


Hela Victorious

by Rerin



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Canon Divergence - Thor: Ragnarok (2017), Gen, Loki and Bruce are friends, Loki wins, Thor: Ragnarok (2017), We were deprived of the ultimate Loki vs. Hela showdown in that movie, all the incest, also not really, but Loki and Heimdall are not, but not really, tagging sibling incest just in case
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-07
Updated: 2019-05-10
Packaged: 2019-10-06 06:00:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 36,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17339882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rerin/pseuds/Rerin
Summary: She's not a Queen, or a Monster - she's the Goddess of Death, and she's taken her brother prisoner.To her delight, it looks like theKing of the fucking Frost Giantswill declare war to take him back.





	1. An Invitation to Mischief

**Author's Note:**

> OK so I blame this one on the Ragnarok art book. I need more Hela in my life. I need more of Hela being a badass and out-loki-ing Loki. I need the ultimate Loki vs. Hela showdown. Also I need Loki and Bruce to be friends, I need Loki to win in the end, and while I’m at it I need Thor as the damsel in distress for, you know, reasons. That said, I’m rating this one M for violence but not for sex-- I’m going for a sort of a “Hela/Thor?!? Oh noooooo” feeling, but Hela is not actually trying to get into Thor’s pants. The point of this fic is that Thor has TWO badass siblings, who both believe that they should be Thor’s _only_ badass sibling.  
> It's gonna be a _Hel_ of a fight.

Hela dragged Thor to the balcony so he could witness the massacre. The would-be refugees were trapped on the bridge, Skurge and the undead horde closing in.

The Goddess of Death flung her brother’s body against the railing, pinning him with her palm on the back of his neck. She pressed in close, savoring the shudder of his back beneath his armor. There was power in him yet, power she would delight in draining away. But first she wanted him to see this; she wanted him to know his people's fate.

“No one’s going anywhere,” she sneered. “I’ll get that sword, even if I have to kill every single one of them to do it.”

Thor looked down at the bridge, at the brave line of people at the edge of the crowd, weapons raised. Even from this distance he could tell they weren’t warriors. They would be cut down in moments.

There was only one hope left—that Korg would arrive with the other ship. Heimdall had assured Thor that the Statesman was on its way, hurtling through the portal, but that had been hours ago and there was no sign of it yet.

But then a fog billowed around the bridge, as if conjured specifically for dramatic effect, and in the midst of it Thor caught a glimpse of an unmistakable silhouette: Loki, arms outstretched, posed like the statue he’d made of himself: _The Savior of Asgard._

And behind him, the massive ship.

Thor laughed in triumph even as his sister plunged a vengeful blade into his back. It was over now—the people would escape.

Hela flipped him onto his back, her lips peeled wide in a snarl, shoving herself against him in frustration. She could feel him healing aggressively beneath her, his body conspiring to push out her blades nearly as fast as she could stab them in. The weapon she had just wedged between his ribs fell free, clanking on the gilded stone, followed by merely a few droplets of blood.

His resilience enraged and intoxicated her, and he knew it. “Had enough?” he panted at her, blood in his smile. She matched his expression tooth for tooth and raised a black spike.

“You really don’t know me. But you _will_ ,” she promised, and drove the spike into his heart. The sound he made at that was so sweet she immediately yearned to hear it again. His heart stuttered, but stubbornly continued to beat, clenching around her weapon, each squeeze threatening to dislodge it. She had to apply considerable force to hold it in place, relishing each pulse of that mighty muscle reverberating up the spike and into her fist.

Her forearm trembled. He wasn’t even looking at her.

Thor was looking past her, to the twilight stars just coming out over Asgard. There was a shimmer of golden stardust in the purpling sky. His people would escape, and with that knowledge he felt… peace. His rabid so-called sister carving him like a roast was inconsequential now. It was over.

Hela clawed at Thor’s mutilated face, raking his dwindling attention back to her. He wasn’t respecting her, seemed barely aware of her. He didn’t know, didn’t _care_ who she was. After spending what felt like eternity erased, blotted from history, forgotten—to be ignored and dismissed like this now, by Odin’s precious heir who’d supplanted her, Odin’s comical pet who’d fouled her mighty warhammer with his grubby hands—it was unconscionable. She would win one thing this day, keep one thing that she deserved. She would have Thor’s recognition.

“I’m not a queen, or a monster,” she said, voice savage. She didn’t need his fealty, and didn’t particularly care if he feared or condemned her. But after millennia of exile she wanted, _needed_ this brother of hers to understand her, to know what she was. She burrowed the spike further down, his heart tightening impossibly strong around it, his blood running freely at last, painting the stones at her feet. “ _I’m the Goddess of Death._ And you will _worship_ me.”

Thor was starting to drift out of consciousness now, unable to give Hela the acknowledgement of her identity that she so desperately wanted. Unable to acknowledge her at all, really. He thought he saw his father, far away, standing on that cliff. _She’s too strong,_ he thought. _She’s too strong and I can’t… without my hammer, I can’t…_

Hela’s eyes went wide as she felt Thor’s body go lax, the thrill of his imminent death crashing through her like a wave. She craved the sensation of his dying, his energy releasing, his soul slipping free of his body at her command. But even as she craved it she knew she couldn’t finish him yet, couldn’t let him go so quickly—it would be a waste. The death of a god could be something special, and the killing of Thor might nourish her for centuries, so long as she managed it correctly. So she ripped the spike from his heart and threw it away. She had a choice to make, and so did he.

“Tell me, Brother. Do you want to live?”

She seized his throat, wringing his answer out of him.

He was half delirious from healing so many wounds all at once, fading in and out between sensations of pain and peace, but he managed to meet his sister’s gaze.

“Yes,” he answered. 

Her smile sealed itself over her teeth, curving across her face. “Whatever insignificant thing you were before, now, you are mine,” she decided. “Whatever power Odin siphoned into you, I shall reclaim.” She slashed her runes into the air in twists of black smoke, pushed her mouth to Thor’s, and sucked the breath from his lungs.

A crack of black lightning split the sky, a strobe of darkness that cloaked the world in night.

***

Down on the bridge, the unnatural flash of darkness and pursuant clap of thunder caused a split-second pause in the battle. Loki stared up at the palace. _Thor’s dead._ In that one instant, sunset had turned to midnight, and gold had turned to black—the entire palace was now the charred color of a burned-out stump. And Loki knew what must have happened. His long-horned helm fell from his hand, even as Hela’s undead warriors resumed their attack.

Then Heimdall grabbed his shoulder and read the horrible thought off his face. _Thor’s dead._

“No. He’s still alive,” Heimdall said, locking his eyes on Loki’s. 

“She broke his power,” Loki whispered in response. “She killed—”

Heimdall shook him, squeezing his shoulder. “See through my eyes,” Heimdall instructed. “Your brother yet lives.”

Loki’s focus went slack, and he saw Hela dragging Thor through the now crypt-black palace halls, saw her heaving him up onto their father’s bed, securing him in place with crossed blades across his neck, his torso, his limbs. She cast a black miasma over him like a blanket, twinkling with the green-black of butterfly wings and inky emeralds. “ _Dream deeply now,_ ” Loki heard Hela say, and her hand brushed Thor’s cheek, calling Loki’s attention to his brother’s face.

“He’s missing an eye,” Loki blurted, blinking himself free of Heimdall’s vision. “She cut out his eye—”

“But left his heart, which is still beating,” Heimdall assured him. “He’s asleep, and healing.”

“The Odinsleep,” Loki realized, and Heimdall nodded, then spun to scythe through another half-dozen undead warriors with the Bifrost sword. 

“It’s time to go,” Heimdall said simply.

“But what about Thor?” Loki asked, even as the encroaching horde pushed them all towards the gangplank, Valkyrie and Korg covering the last of the refugees as they clambered into the ship.

“And what happened to Hulk?” Valkyrie demanded, kicking an undead torso free of her Dragonfang.

Heimdall glanced out at the water. “Hela will keep Thor alive. The Hulk is wrestling Fenris at the bottom of the ocean, being dragged towards the edge of the world.”

“Can we help him?” Valkyrie half-yelled.

Heimdall hesitated. “We can try,” he replied.

Loki took a deep breath. _She’ll keep Thor alive._ “All right,” he said with as much authority as he could muster. “Let’s go. Korg—everyone—on the ship.”

Loki sent a mental signal to the helmsman standing by and the ship began to rise, the last few gladiators tromping up the gangplank. In seconds it was just Loki and Valkyrie left on the Bifrost bridge.

“Valkyrie,” Loki yelled. “Come on.”

“I’m staying,” she replied. “If Hela’s still alive, I’m staying ‘til she’s dead. Get the people to safety.”

Loki grabbed her arm, tight. “Hasn’t it occurred to you,” he said over the rumble of the engines. “That you’re one of the people?”

Valkyrie froze, gritting her teeth, and with one swift tug Loki hauled her up off the bridge and onto the retracting gangplank. She put up a perfunctory struggle, but by the time she shoved Loki back, the door was sealing, and she was trapped aboard the vessel.

“Drop me off at the palace,” she insisted. “I’ve got to save Thor.”

Loki’s face twitched. “I want to save him too, but what about Bruce?” he countered. He was already thinking ahead, and Dr. Banner’s greener self would be a valuable asset in the inevitable rematch against Hela. “If he falls into the void he may be lost forever.” 

Valkyrie clenched her jaw, knowing Loki was right.

***

The Statesman maneuvered around the edge of the world, guided by Heimdall to the place where Hulk was clinging to the last possible handhold of rock, his green feet swinging freely as the ocean poured away into the emptiness of space.

Comprehension flared in Hulk’s expression as the ship hovered beneath him, just beyond the boundaries of Asgard’s impossible gravity. A hangar door split open, and Hulk eyed it, calculating—and with a grunt he launched himself towards it, sailing through a thousand yards of open space before landing in a somersault roll on the deck, safely inside the ship.

The doors immediately sealed and the hangar began to pressurize, and Hulk found himself without any enemies to smash. He turned around, breathing hard. 

Out in the corridor, Valkyrie was about to push the button to access the hangar when Loki blocked the button with his hand. “Wait. We need him to transform back into a human,” he said urgently. “Agreed?” 

“Get out of my way,” Valkyrie grumbled at him. “Move your hand or I’ll cut it off.” 

Loki moved his hand. “Valkyrie, listen to me. We need the Hulk on our side, but we also need this ship intact. His friends on earth devised a way to make him change--they call it a lullaby, but for it to work he has to be willing.” 

Valkyrie paused and looked Loki over, trying to figure out what he was getting at. “So what?” she demanded, shaking her head. “Are you saying you need my help to convince him to turn back into that soft, tiny man?”

Loki looked relieved. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, exactly.” 

A loud grunt from the other side of the door seemed to indicate that Hulk was less than pleased. Valkyrie frowned, allowing Loki to interpret her silence as assent. She pushed the button.

Hulk greeted her immediately as she stepped into the hangar. “Angry Girl! Where Thor?”

“He’s still on Asgard,” Valkyrie informed him.

“Hulk get him,” Hulk offered.

Valkyrie swallowed. “We’re going to rescue him, I promise,” she said.

Loki appeared in the doorway behind her. “But we can’t do that with a ship full of refugees,” he stated cautiously. “We have to take them somewhere, drop them off, then come back for Thor.”

Hulk grunted in suspicion. “Loki… friend?” he asked, eyes turning to Valkyrie.

“Ha,” she scoffed. “I wouldn’t go that far.”

Hulk raised an enormous fist. “Smash?” he suggested, and Loki froze.

“Hulk, if you attack me you might damage the ship and leave the people stranded,” Loki reasoned, keeping his voice calm.

Valkyrie put her hand on Hulk’s arm. “…He has a point,” she conceded. “You probably shouldn’t smash him on the ship, even if he is an obnoxious little snot who violates people's most traumatic memories.”

Loki fixed her with his coolest gaze. “And how else could I have convinced you to help me?”

“Help _you?_ ” she echoed, incredulous. Loki ignored her.

“Hulk, we may be traveling for a while and I want to make sure you’re…comfortable,” Loki said diplomatically. “You’re our, ah, most distinguished passenger and King Thor’s honored companion, so if there’s anything—”

“King Thor?” Hulk repeated, suspicious.

Loki blinked. “Well, he is now, isn’t he? Odin is dead and we certainly aren’t swearing fealty to Hela.”

“Hmf,” grumbled Hulk, sitting cross-legged on the hangar floor. Loki sent Valkyrie a pointed look, which she returned with a roll of her eyes.

“Hulk,” she began, setting a friendly hand on his big green shoulder. “Are you gonna be okay in here? I mean, on the ship? It’s not like Sakaar; you can’t demolish the place or thrash a bunch of gladiators to blow off steam.”

Hulk thought about that, eyes roving over the confines of the hangar, heavy brows knitting in concern. “Ship small. Hulk…might smash,” he muttered guiltily.

Loki and Valkyrie looked at one another. “…That’s right,” Loki said carefully. “But, you’re also extremely valuable, and,”

“Ugh,” Hulk grunted in disgust.

“He means we’re glad you’re here, with us,” Valkyrie interjected. “But while we’re out in space, it might be safer for everyone if you just take a nap. All right?”

Hulk spent a long moment looking at her, and then sent a begrudging glance at Loki. “…Okay,” he muttered.

“Ah, good,” Loki said in relief, and raised a tentative hand. “If you’d like, I can just magically facilitate a sort of—”

“No magic,” Hulk half-roared.

“…Alternatively, there are plenty of drugs aboard that could probably—”

“No drugs!” Hulk insisted, raising his voice to the point where Loki wisely stopped talking.

Satisfied that he’d shut Loki up, Hulk turned to Valkyrie. He searched her face, his expression shifting, softening. Carefully, he rolled one big hand over, showing her the inside of his wrist. “…Pet,” he said.

She scrunched up her face at him. “What?” she asked, sounding vaguely offended.

“Girl pet, soft,” Hulk instructed, nodding down at his offered arm.

Loki cleared his throat, and when he caught Valkyrie’s eye he urgently demonstrated a petting motion along the inside of his own wrist. “Like this, like this,” he mouthed, eyebrows high. 

Valkyrie frowned but cooperated, her fingertips stroking the Hulk’s skin.

“Mmm,” Hulk said, eyelids fluttering. “Say… sun…”

“Sun?” Valkyrie repeated, continuing to pet that great green wrist.

“Sun’s…go…down,” Hulk mumbled, and his head slumped forward. With a shuddering sigh he began to transform.

Valkyrie watched in amazement as the Hulk’s massive body compacted, groaning, into the cowering form of Bruce Banner.

“Ow, ow, ow,” Bruce was whining into the deck, curled into a mostly-naked ball, his elbows up and his wrists pressed to his ears as if to protect his head from an incoming blow.

“Bruce.” Valkyrie squatted beside him. “You okay?”

“...I think I broke my neck on the bridge,” Bruce panted, rolling his shoulders. Then he looked up. “But Hulk healed me so, yeah, I’m, I guess I’m okay. Where are we?”

“This is the Statesman,” Loki provided from across the room, and with a subtle gesture he restored Bruce’s clothing.

“Whoa, thanks, magic clothes,” Bruce gawped, his hands immediately running down the fabric of Tony Stark’s t-shirt and jacket. Then he grimaced and tried his best to adjust the uncomfortable crotch of the too-tight pants, without anybody noticing--but apparently Loki noticed anyway, because in the next instant the pants felt about two sizes bigger. 

He looked up at Loki, eyes wide. “You fixed the pants!” He couldn’t have kept the happy surprise from his voice if he’d tried.

Loki gave him a half-bemused, half-insulted look. “I _did_ say I wanted you to be comfortable.”

“You mean you said that to Hulk,” Bruce surmised. “And then he agreed to turn back into me? That doesn't make sense. How--”

“Via the lullaby,” Loki explained. “The Valkyrie did the honors, of course. The Hulk and I have a strictly… hands-off relationship. I’m sure you understand.”

“Okay, yeah,” Bruce’s brow furrowed in confusion. “But how’d you know about the lullaby? It was supposed to be like a top-secret Avengers thing.”

“Secrecy,” Loki said as though it were his favorite word. “Is an invitation to mischief.” 

Bruce mulled that over and decided it made sense. Of course Loki had been spying on the Avengers all these years--he probably knew more about Bruce’s teammates than Bruce himself.

“So, did we win the fight?” Bruce asked, looking around. “Did Thor kill his sister?”

“Thor and Hela are still on Asgard,” Valkyrie informed him. “We’re going back on a rescue mission as soon as we get the people settled somewhere.”

“Okay, rescue mission, got it,” Bruce said, and nervously took a deep breath. “But, um, where are we going first?”

The corner of Loki’s mouth turned down.

***

“Jotunheim,” Heimdall said firmly.

Loki sighed. “…I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

Heimdall waited a few seconds before replying. “There is nowhere else within range.”

Apparently, the Statesman was stocked with nothing but booze. Heimdall, Loki, Valkyrie, Korg and Bruce were gathered around a table in Loki’s quarters, drinking as they discussed their plan. Bruce wasn’t totally sure that it was safe for him to drink the alien liquor, but there was literally nothing else for him to have--and nothing else for him to do.

“Then we park the ship until we can be resupplied for a longer journey,” Loki proposed. “If you’re so eager to make use of my heritage, why not let me freeze everyone into stasis? I could do it all at once, nobody would even feel it. That way you can all just stay here, safely preserved, until the resupply arrives.”

“Resupply from where?” Heimdall asked evenly, his molten eyes fixed on Loki. “There is only one option: Jotunheim.”

Loki stared at Heimdall for a long, quiet moment. Bruce was struck by the notion that he’d never seen anybody _begging_ like that before, with a such a measured expression on their face.

“Jotunheim,” Loki said in voice that strove to sound condescending. “Has been engulfed in turmoil since the demise of their previous ruler.”

“So you might say,” Korg spoke up gingerly. “They’re in desperate need of leadership?”

Loki somehow flinched without moving a muscle, and Bruce watched in curiosity as resignation settled in Loki’s eyes.

Heimdall stood, taking his drink with him. “Odin foresaw a time when the Jotuns would not be our enemies,” he said to Loki, and Bruce would’ve sworn that was meant to be a reassuring statement, accompanied by a reassuring pat of a hand on Loki’s shoulder—but as Heimdall’s broad hand settled down, Bruce caught the nearly imperceptible quiver that ran up Loki’s arm. “…Perhaps that time has come,” Heimdall concluded.

Loki didn’t look up and didn’t say a word, which seemed to Bruce like another possible flag. Heimdall released Loki’s shoulder. “I’ll go up to the bridge and set our course,” he said to the rest of them, and took his leave.

No one said anything for a minute, Loki staring glumly at nothing.

“I like him,” Korg said brightly. “That Heimdall guy. Seems like he knows what he’s doing. Real professional.”

Valkyrie made a scoffing noise and leaned across the table to clink her half-empty bottle against Loki’s half-empty glass. “Hey, your highness,” she said abruptly, jarring Loki into looking at her. “Drink up.”

Loki didn’t move, but his expression turned sharp. “Do you know what my favorite thing is?” he snapped.

Valkyrie raised her eyebrows, peering evaluatively down the neck of her bottle. “…I might’ve heard a rumor or two, on Sakaar,” she began casually.

“Being _mocked_ ,” Loki finished curtly, and stood up. He glared coldly at Valkyrie, who had the decency to refrain from smirking at him, then gave Korg a clear look of thanks-for-nothing. Finally, Loki cast a brief glance at Bruce, and left the room.

“…Is he okay?” Bruce asked worriedly, once Loki was gone.

“Not sure any of us are okay, if you think about it,” Korg offered humbly. “All of us, torn from our homes, lost across the galaxy, and, with the violence and fighting earlier today, that Asgard place overrun with zombies and the Lord of Thunder taken prisoner by his sister—everyone’s a wreck.” He raised his drink to his rocky lips and chugged.

“What were the rumors?” Bruce wondered abruptly, and then reached for his glass in a bad effort to appear only mildly interested. “From Sakaar?”

Valkyrie looked at Bruce like she couldn’t believe he’d just asked that, and then searched his face, clearly debating whether or not that was information he needed to know. Bruce took a sip of liquor, hoping he looked like a trustworthy confidant.

“I heard the Grandmaster lost a bet to him,” Korg provided innocently. “He was sort of popular after that. A minor celebrity.”

“And _I_ heard,” Valkyrie said in a low voice. “That the Grandmaster doesn’t like losing bets.”

Bruce frowned, sensing something dark between Valkyrie’s words.

He mulled it over, considering what little he knew about Loki’s situation on Sakaar. Loki had been wrapped in chains in Valkyrie’s apartment. He’d said he’d run out of favor with the Grandmaster. He’d wanted to escape.

Bruce resumed sipping his drink, doing his best to pay attention to Valkyrie and Korg’s conversation as they reminisced about other people they knew from Sakaar and other rumors they both had heard.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about Loki.


	2. Et tu, Skurge?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _It is so lovely when family keeps in touch._

Bruce jolted awake to a hard flat surface pressed against his face. “Wha—” he mumbled, sitting up from where he’d fallen asleep at the table. It was dark in the room now, the only light coming in from the stars beyond the window. The unfamiliar alcohol had crept up on him and when he’d zonked out, Valkyrie and Korg must have decided just to leave him be. Based on the stiffness in his body and the dryness of his mouth he must’ve been asleep for hours.

Gradually it occurred to him that he wasn’t alone—a creepily familiar silhouette stood by the window, looking out into the blackness of space.

“Loki,” Bruce blurted, voice half-hoarse.

“Bruce,” Loki replied, not looking at him. “Glad you aren’t green. I wasn’t sure about waking you.”

“Better to let sleeping Hulks lie?” Bruce joked lamely, and then rubbed his head when Loki didn’t respond. “Sorry,” Bruce winced. “Is it late? I should--I’ll go,” he decided, standing up so fast he knocked his knee on the edge of the table. “Ouch. Sorry again.”

“Do you always do that?” Loki wondered idly, turning towards him.

“What, bang my knee? I mean, I am sort of clumsy,” Bruce replied awkwardly.

“I meant, do you always assume you’re intruding? That you’re not wanted?” Loki clarified, cocking his head to one side.

Bruce huffed out a breath he hadn’t meant to hold. “Yeah, I guess…that’s, uh, a thing I do,” he admitted.

“You aren’t intruding here,” Loki told him. “You can stay. Besides, I… probably shouldn’t be alone with my thoughts right now.”

“Oh,” Bruce mulled that over for a handful of blinks and then sat back down. “Okay.”

Loki looked back at the window, and to Bruce it appeared that the lines of his shoulders were just a little too rigid.

“Um, Loki?” Bruce asked cautiously after a moment. “…What sort of thoughts are you having?”

“The Tesseract,” Loki sighed. “It’s sitting in Odin’s vault. If I had it, I could transport us to Vanaheim or anywhere else.”

Bruce’s mind leapt ahead. “Do you think Hela can use it?”

Loki nodded. “I do,” he said gravely. “I think it’s inevitable that she will use it, now that the Bifrost is no longer an option for her. She’ll reanimate Asgard’s fallen with the Eternal Flame, travel to Helheim to raise the armies of Hel, and then—”

“And then invade whatever planet she wants,” Bruce finished, catching on. “Opening portals with the Tesseract to transport her troops—just like you did with the Chitauri in New York.”

“Precisely,” Loki said with a half-shrug.

“So… you’re thinking about sneaking off and stealing the Tesseract? So Hela can’t use it?” Bruce supposed.

There was a beat, and then Loki hummed a chuckle. “Doctor Bruce Banner,” he mused. “Are you reading my mind?”

“No, I just, it seems like you really don’t want to go to that Jotun place, but you _do_ want to help the refugees, and you don’t want Hela to win, and… well, if you had the Tesseract, you could solve all three of those problems.”

“And,” Loki said pointedly.

“And you could rescue Thor,” Bruce added immediately. “I mean, if you’re feeling generous or if it’s your turn or whatever. I don’t know how it works with you two, but it kind of seems like maybe you have a ‘nobody kills my brother except for me’ kind of a thing going on. Which, I should add, definitely does not seem healthy.”

It was still too dark in the room for Bruce to see anything but Loki’s silhouette, but the newly relaxed slope of Loki’s shoulders almost definitely accompanied a smile. 

“How would you do it?” Loki wondered amiably. “Sneak back to Asgard, I mean.”

“I guess I’d have to take a shuttle, or like an escape pod or something. Oh! The Commodore. Do we still have the Commodore?” Bruce asked excitedly.

“We do not,” Loki explained. “It was left behind when it was overrun in the battle. There is a shuttlecraft which doubles as an emergency escape vehicle. But it’s built into the ship in such a way that if I launch it, I’d leave the Statesman adrift without power or propulsion.”

“You mean like… you’d leave everybody waiting helplessly here in space on the chance that you’d return with Thor and the Tesseract?”

Loki nodded again, and Bruce blew out a long breath. “Thanks for telling me,” he said solemnly. “I mean, thanks for telling me what you were thinking about, instead of just going through with it.”

The intercom beeped with an incoming message. Loki bristled.

“ _I’m dismantling the emergency shuttle,_ ” said Heimdall’s voice through the speaker.

“Is that wise?” Loki wondered in high-browed disdain.

“ _You know I prefer not to interfere,_ ” Heimdall rumbled reproachfully.

“Always the observer, rarely the actor,” Loki scoffed. “Such a burden you bear.”

The intercom beeped again, signaling the end of the conversation.

“Wow,” Bruce remarked into the ensuing silence. “I guess Heimdall’s, um, keeping an eye on you?”

“Is that a joke?” Loki asked, sounding too tired to be properly annoyed. “Anyway I suppose I should be relieved.”

“…You were kind of hoping someone would take the choice away from you—I get that,” Bruce said in solidarity. “You thought that once it occurred to you to go racing off on a rescue mission all alone, you’d have to go through with it.”

“I wasn’t going to go alone,” Loki corrected. “I was going to bring you and the Valkyrie.”

Bruce was taken aback. “You think she would’ve gone along with that? Leaving everyone stranded, I mean?”

Loki made a derisive little sound and waved a hand, bringing the lights up in the cabin to just below restaurant-dim, and Bruce jumped in his seat as the lighting revealed a body wrapped in chains on the floor—Valkyrie, unconscious.

“We would’ve been back on Asgard before she woke up,” Loki said mildly.

“You drugged her?!” Bruce gasped. “Is she okay?!”

Loki rolled his eyes and the chains disappeared. “She’s fine. I’m sure it’s not the first time she’s drunk herself into a stupor,” he muttered.

“Hey, wait a minute…” Bruce’s face clouded over at the unwelcome thought. “Did you try to drug _me?_ ”

“But the thought of the Hulk destroying the shuttle en route…” Loki trailed off. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Next stop: Jotunheim.”

There was that look again, that weird resignation—there was just enough light now for Bruce to see it in Loki’s expression.

“So, hey,” Bruce said, slowly, sitting back in his seat and attempting to relax. “Besides the place being a mess or whatever, why don’t you want to go there? I get that you’re technically the son of the previous king, right, whom you murdered, and… is that it?”

Loki quirked an eyebrow at him. “Isn’t that enough?” He slouched into a seat at the table, opposite Bruce. “I also tried to destroy the planet, wipe out the whole population,” he added conversationally.

Bruce felt a yin-yang of hot and cold slosh around in his chest, the sensations never quite mixing. He swallowed. “…I don’t get it,” he mumbled after a minute. “Even if they were your enemies—”

“Here’s the thing,” Loki said, brow furrowed. “Odin killed a thousand times more Jotuns than I ever did, and once he had them subdued, he said, ‘now I will rule over you in peace.’ But after what I attempted, rightful King of them all or not, if I go there and say ‘now I’ll rule in peace,’ how am I any different? I know Heimdall wants to deposit me there like so much misplaced baggage.” He stopped to take a breath, and continued in a frightfully accurate imitation of Heimdall’s voice: “Here’s your missing prince, all hail the return of your king! No need to invite me to the regicide, I’ll be perfectly content to enjoy the show from afar.”

Bruce chewed on one side of his lip and then the other, eyebrows high. “Speaking of _baggage_ ,” he muttered, and Loki tipped his head to cede the point, which Bruce then graciously abandoned. “…So you really think they’ll try to kill you? The Jotuns, I mean?”

Loki met his eyes. “What would your people try to do to me if I returned to Earth?”

“I don’t know,” Bruce grimaced. “Probably nothing nice.”

“Nobody’s saying I haven’t been a villain,” Loki’s tone was warmly pleasant. “Least of all me. But I’m hardly eager to be paraded around and executed like Vercingetorix.”

Bruce frowned. The name was vaguely familiar. “I’m sorry, who?”

“Really?” Loki blinked. “The famous chieftain who defied your Julius Caesar?”

“Hey, he wasn’t my Caesar,” Bruce shook his head, smiling in his vaguely apologetic way. “Little before my time.”

“Before my time as well,” Loki acknowledged. “But still… a lesson in consequences.”

“I don’t think I like those kinds of lessons,” Bruce mumbled, and Loki grew oddly still, staring right through Bruce as if there was something supremely interesting on the wall behind him. Bruce shifted uncomfortably, waiting for him to snap out of it—which finally he did.

“I just had a thought,” Loki offered smoothly, refocusing on Bruce’s face. 

“Yeah? About what? Ides of March?” Bruce guessed apprehensively.

Loki grinned in delight. “Mm, I really am impressed, Doctor. I swear you’re in my head.”

Bruce groaned, vaguely distressed. “Seriously, I don’t think that’s somewhere I’d choose to be.”

“I don’t blame you.” Loki’s smile acquired a sympathetic edge. “It’s…often not a very nice place.”

“Yeah, I get it, and unfortunately I can relate.” Bruce leaned forward and put on his most earnest expression, the one that even Tony had to take seriously. “Just be honest with me,” he implored. “You’re not planning on knifing Heimdall in the back or anything, are you?”

Loki looked surprised enough to laugh, but an insistent beep of the intercom interfered. “ _Loki,_ ” said Heimdall’s voice.

“I am not,” Loki said flatly, instantly annoyed. “You can’t possibly think I’d turn against Heimdall, while Thor is held captive. Heimdall is our—”

“ _It’s Hela_ ,” Heimdall’s voice interrupted. “ _She’s contacting us._ ”

Bruce and Loki traded glances, and hurried towards the bridge.

***

“Oh Heimdall, you ponderous _bore,_ ” Hela was orating on the comm screen, as Bruce and Loki arrived on the bridge. “It’s no wonder Odin kept you benched. You were never quite cut out to be a leader, were you? I want to talk to my brother.”

“Your brother is beside you,” Heimdall stated. “If you wish to speak to him, you do not need my assistance.”

Loki stopped in his tracks and held out his arm to stop Bruce from moving forward into the view of whatever camera must have been recording Heimdall. Bruce peered over Loki’s arm at the image on the screen: it was his first glimpse of Hela, who appeared to be a slender and dangerous woman in a sleek black catsuit, tantalizingly embellished with metallic green accents. She was perched in _The Thinker_ ’s pose on the edge of an enormous boat-like bed, upon which Thor appeared to be asleep, pinned in a thicket of obsidian blades. There was a black patch covering his right eye, but other than that, he seemed to be in one piece.

“ _This_ brother’s not much good at talking,” Hela crooned with an exaggerated pout, employing a tone usually reserved for asking dogs if they’d been naughty. Then her voice sharpened to an ultimatum. “I want the other one. The… _conversationalist._ ” Somehow she made that sound like a dirty word, her voice like a fingernail down Bruce’s spine. He shivered. 

Loki cleared his throat and stepped up, dismissing Heimdall without a glance. “Sister,” he greeted with a reptilian smile. “I’d say it was good of you to call, but, I don’t really think it’s good of you to…well, anything.”

Hela unfurled from her seated position in a way that arched her back and her neck and her breasts all at once. “ _Fi_ nally,” she declared, as if Loki’s appearance was some personal triumph of hers. “Someone I can _speak_ to. I felt like I was talking to a leaden statue at the bottom of a well.”

Bruce checked Heimdall’s face for a reaction, but the formidable gatekeeper remained unaffected.

“We all have our talents,” Loki said placatingly.

Hela smirked and stretched an elegant arm toward Thor’s face. “Some of us were given better gifts than others,” she purred, and swirled her fingers in Thor’s hair in a way that made Bruce’s own scalp itch. “Do you have any idea what Odin gave this one? Besides that hand-me-down hammer, I mean. Really, a pre-owned accessory, for a god such as Thor? How dreadfully gauche.”

“Almost as bad as a hand-me-down eyepatch,” Loki remarked. “One might assume you had a complex.”

Hela chuckled in the back of her throat, her smile sliding wider across her face. “Are you calling me a daddy’s girl?” her eyes gleamed in amusement. “I wonder. Does that make you the pot or the kettle?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Loki smiled with at least twice as many teeth as were necessary.

“Ha,” she laughed, arching her back like a cobra. “Odin was a short-sighted conqueror, even when he had both eyes. I will say one thing for the old man—when he made a mistake, he knew how to _overcorrect._ Take _him,_ for example.” She indicated Thor with a dramatic flourish of her hand. “Odin started with the Goddess of Death as his child. When that became inconvenient for him, he sent me to the bin and went the complete opposite direction.”

“A god of loud noises and flashing lights, yes,” Loki said with vague impatience. “Quite a shift in priorities.”

“A god of life,” Hela announced, raising her voice and then basking in the seconds of silence that followed her proclamation. She resumed petting Thor’s hair, gloating. Loki’s eyes were drawn down to the motion of her talon-like fingers. “…at least, that’s what he could be, someday. If he ever grows up, which, now that he’s my devoted acolyte, he won’t.”

“Ah, yes. So this would be the part where you’re threatening to kill him,” Loki said cordially, nodding as though he were enjoying the revelation of a familiar plot at last. “Unless we, what? Kneel before you? Bring you the Bifrost sword? I’d hoped your demands might be slightly less tedious.”

“You are of course welcome to do either of those things at any time,” Hela replied magnanimously. “But it isn’t strictly necessary. Whether you join me or not, Thor’s going to be dying very gradually for me for a very long time. I just wanted you to know.”

“How thoughtful of you to keep me informed,” Loki matched her tone. “It is so lovely when family keeps in touch.”

“Oh, is that why you’re running home to Jotunheim?” Hela asked airily. “I figured you were just off to hide behind your mummy’s skirts. Not that I’ve ever seen a Jotun wearing a skirt—or a Jotun who wasn’t male, for that matter. Which begs the question… where does Jotun spawn come from, anyway? Do they breed without females, like…worms or something?”

The word for that occurred to Bruce, dredged from the depths of academia: _Androdioecy._ He decided not to mention it.

Loki smiled as easily as if that were the cleverest joke he’d ever heard. “Perhaps you should ask your favorite leaden statue,” he proposed, and shot Heimdall a friendly look. “Heimdall, one of your nine mothers was a Jotun, was she not?”

Bruce glanced at Heimdall, startled. “You had _nine_ mothers?” he whispered.

“It’s true,” Heimdall spoke up. “Nine sisters carried me into this world—”

“Ugh, No. Just—no.” Hela gave an exaggerated groan. “Spare me the mythology, Gatekeeper, your voice grows rust in my ears. I shouldn’t be surprised that it took a whole _drove_ of sows to birth you—any one woman would have surely died of boredom if she’d had to bear you all by herself.”

“Dear sister,” Loki heaved a pitying sigh. “Are you really so desperate for attention that you’ve resorted to insulting Heimdall’s mothers?”

Hela’s eyes flared, their pupils shrinking. “Why, brother, you amaze me. You’re very quick to defend the women you dangled before me as _bait_ a mere moment ago. Believe me, I’d content myself with insulting _your_ mother all day, if anybody knew which Jotun _parasite_ she’d been.”

Loki had clasped his hands behind his back at some point, and now Bruce watched with rising apprehension as Loki carefully wrapped one of them into a fist. “My mother feasts in Valhalla,” he said calmly. “Where you will never tread.”

Hela laughed at that, open-mouthed and savage, and Bruce felt a twinge of sympathy for Loki so dark and deep it might have been coming from Hulk.

“Oh, I _like_ you,” Hela said to her youngest brother. “Shame I’ve got my hands on _this_ son of Odin instead.” She swung her chin towards Thor. “Though his life holds ten times the power of yours, and will be ten times as satisfying to devour, you and I… we would have had fun.”

“Indeed,” Loki smiled coldly. “I always did enjoy putting tyrants in their place. Orchestrating their humiliation and demise, constantly sabotaging their armor with countless little knicks. You can ask Thor all about it, when your loneliness eventually compels you to wake him.”

“Maybe I’ll wake him now,” Hela proposed, a cruel edge in her smirk. “Show him how his cowardly little brother flees to Jotunheim. Show him how he’s been abandoned, while you scamper off to soil the snow.”

Loki shook his head in consternation. “It seems you’re largely ignorant of Jotun customs,” he said quietly.

“Those frostbitten beasts have customs?” Hela reacted with exaggerated shock. “Pray, _do_ enlighten me. Have you any particularly scandalous use for icicles?”

“No,” Loki replied neutrally. “But we are known for never refusing an invitation to open war.”

There was a breathless pause, and then an ancient joy shone in Hela’s eyes. “War, is it?” she pronounced. “How droll. I’ve always loved war. I wonder what our brother here will say when I tell him you’re rallying an army of Frost Giants for us to tame.”

“He’ll say we’re going to banish you when we win,” Loki assured her. “I’ll find whatever Odin used to seal you up before, and bind the lock not to my own life, but to the life of the thousand youngest stars in the cosmos, so that as long as even one of them burns, you’ll never escape.”

Bruce’s brain informed him that could mean a prison sentence of literally trillions of years. His eyebrows rose, but once again he refrained from commenting.

“Words,” Hela scoffed. “Your talent, as already discussed.”

“One of many,” Loki was quick to assert. “You were right about Odin’s need to overcorrect. Ask yourself, why a third child? What mistake did he make with the mighty Thor?”

Hela swallowed, her smile frozen in place, her eyes drilling into Loki’s. She had no answer.

“Why did Thor need your hand-me-down hammer?” Loki pressed, and when she still didn’t reply, Loki looked at Thor’s sleeping face on the screen. “Water. Air. Electricity. Even life, as you say. Massive, elemental energies. All of that—and absolutely no inclination for finesse. Thor can make clouds. But he can’t make a cloud look like a bird— _I_ can. I can even make it sing.”

“Singing clouds? Hm! Forgive me if I fail to tremble.” Hela rolled her eyes.

Loki’s smile intensified. “Thor can make rain. I can make it rain _wine_.”

Hela’s cheek twitched as a drip of dark red splashed onto her face, followed by another, and soon she was forced to wipe streaks from her cheeks as a shower of wine fell, inexplicably, from the ceiling above her, spattering both her and Thor with drops of red.

Bruce could see that Loki’s fist was trembling a little where it was clenched behind his back, though his face showed only smug bemusement, betraying no hint of exertion.

Hela licked a dribble of wine from her upper lip. “Delicious,” she deemed, as the rain of wine abruptly ceased. “You must be in high demand at parties. What other primitive magic tricks have you got? Frogs? Locusts? Rivers of blood?”

“That and more,” Loki said, voice low. “I could turn you into a frog right now, except I’d hate to disappoint my armies. The legendary Ice Barons of Jotunheim wouldn’t care for your defeat to be too… comical.”

Hela chuckled, shaking her head. “My, my. How you _double down_. It’s almost admirable, in its own quaint way. But you forget I am your _elder_ sister. Whatever parlor tricks you have, I have seen them all before.”

“Exactly my point,” Loki said smoothly. “Odin taught me his Seidr. I am the heir to his craft, to his _art_ , and to Frigga’s as well. Whatever Odin knew, whatever he wielded, whatever he wrought, whatever snare he cast to contain you, I will cast it twice as well, and pack you into half the space he gave you before.”

Hela’s gaze was patronizing, nearly fond. “Loud bark for a mangy pup,” she said.

“Hah,” Loki’s grin contained too many teeth again. “Barking’s more of Thor’s area,” he said dismissively. “As for me… _I bite._ ”

There was a whoosh and a thud and Hela jolted as something happened, on the screen—at first Bruce couldn’t tell what, but Hela’s eyes were suddenly wide, her teeth clenched—and then Bruce saw that an enormous black battle axe was lodged in her torso, horizontally across her midsection, in such a way that it should have cut her clean in half—and was perhaps only stopped by her spine.

“ _Skurge_ ,” Hela gurgled in sheer rage. “ _Skurge, you…traitor!_ ”

“Sorry, I—I dunno wot just—” a new voice came from the comm screen, distressed and thickly accented. “I didn’t mean to, sommat came over me, see, I didn’t mean to—” Bruce couldn’t see who was speaking, but the sound of heavy boots and clanking armor beating a rapid retreat was hard to miss.

Once Skurge had apparently fled the room, Hela wrenched the axehead away from her body, shiny oil-black organs bulging out and threatening to spill from the horrific wound. With both hands she held her innards in place, heaving for breath.

Loki narrowed his eyes, his lip curling in disgust. “Skurge was my minion long before he was yours,” Loki practically spat at the screen. “Next time you hire someone, you might want to check their references, you careless, overconfident hag.”

“And I thought… we were getting along so well,” Hela moaned, and groped one hand towards Thor’s wrist on the bed. Seizing it fast, she mumbled something Bruce couldn’t interpret, and black sizzles of lightning swarmed down Thor’s arm and skittered up Hela’s, apparently healing the cut from the axe. After a few seconds of crackling static, she seemed completely whole once more, though she was still breathing hard.

“Remarkable,” she huffed, regained her composure. “You reached into his mind, from such a distance, without a visual connection—how did you even know Skurge was here in the room?”

“His shadow was on the wall,” Loki explained. “Bit hard to miss, with that boorish axe you gave him.”

“I’ve underestimated you, Prince Loki of Asgard,” Hela said, voice oddly thick with a definite note of respect.

Loki opened his mouth.

“That’s King Loki, of Jotunheim,” Heimdall said for him, and Loki closed his mouth, looking infinitely pleased.

“And I’ve had more than enough of your tiresome noise for today, sister,” Loki said. “ _My ears are growing rust._ ”

He smirked at her flabbergasted expression, and deactivated the screen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And if you thought that was fun, just you wait! :D The good stuff is coming up.  
> Thanks so much for all the support so far!!


	3. Oil and Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With heaps of thanks and praise to my awesome beta reader, mayonegg. :D

“Oh my god,” Bruce said in awe, breaking the silence on the bridge. Loki sent him an appreciative glance. “That was totally crazy! That Skurge guy almost cut her in half and then she just—” he gestured with both hands, pulling handfuls of invisible viscera towards his stomach. “Scooped everything back together like she barely felt it!”

“She’s grafted Thor’s power to her own,” Loki said, his expression clouding over.

“And that’s… really bad?” Bruce inferred.

“Yeah,” Loki said, declining to elaborate. “It’s really bad.”

“Did you mean what you said,” Heimdall asked gravely. “About declaring war?”

Loki scowled, instantly offended. “Is that a serious question? Do you think I’d be so foolish as to go war-mongering into Jotunheim after everything that’s happened? Do you think I’ve learned nothing from the past eight years? Of course I didn’t mean it. I don’t even want to set foot in that frozen slum, much less marshal an army there.”

“What?” Bruce’s jaw dropped. “You—so you just made all that up? I mean, I was convinced, man. I thought we were gonna have like a full-blown, zombies vs. ice giants thing here.”

“Frost Giants,” Loki corrected, not unkindly. “And, technically it’s _Draugrs_ , not zombies. In any case, if you were fooled, perhaps Hela was as well. If we’re lucky, the anticipation of an epic battle will distract her long enough for us to rescue Thor.”

“You might want to reconsider,” Heimdall suggested. “What you said about the Jotuns never turning down a war is truer than you know.”

“And you think they’d fight for me?” Loki scoffed.

“I think they’d fight for vengeance,” Heimdall replied. “To settle scores. To prove themselves. Perhaps even to save face.” The ancient gatekeeper smiled as Loki’s shoulders sagged imperceptibly at his words. “Yes. I believe those are all reasons a Jotun would go to war.”

“Heimdall,” Loki managed to say - and he didn’t say _please_ , but Bruce could have sworn that a _please_ was there, unspoken, in the air between them. Loki was doing that thing again, like he was begging to be let out of a trap or at least excused from the dinner table. But before Bruce could wonder too much about the significance of whatever conflict he was detecting, Loki found something to say. “Surely I’m a poor standard against which to measure.”

“You’re right,” Heimdall agreed in a tone that was almost cheerful. “But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong. I will not make the choice for you, but if you choose to unite the Jotuns and lead them to victory against Hela, restoring them from the ruin you caused, I will serve in your vanguard.”

Loki blinked so hard Bruce could’ve sworn he heard his eyelids click. As if in slow-motion, Loki’s gaze swept over his surroundings and then settled on Bruce. Bruce saw on his face the sort of final call for help that a drowning person might make before sinking under the waves once and for all. Bruce wasn’t sure what to do about that, but he knew he had to do something.

“Wow,” he spoke up, fidgeting under the scrutiny and trying not to rub his face too much. “Marching into battle in the vanguard, um, you guys really do that stuff, huh? Yeah… wow. Okay, look, I know I’m just a human and I don’t know what the whole deal is with the realms and whatever but, here’s what I’ve got so far. Help me out if I’m wrong. Loki doesn’t want to go to Jotunheim, but he kind of has to, and when he gets there, Heimdall wants him to spin everybody up for an actual no-kidding war against Hela.”

A flicker of relief crossed Loki’s face, and Bruce suspected he was on the right track. “Yes, that’s the short of it,” Loki said.

“Okay,” Bruce said, taking a breath. “But, war is bad because Hela totally loves war, so we’d be giving her exactly what she wants. So…why does Heimdall think it’s a good idea?”

“Because,” Heimdall answered softly. “In ten thousand years of observing the universe, I have never seen anyone else do what Loki has done.”

Bruce thought that sounded like high praise; Loki had always seemed like the sort who would bask in a compliment, but instead he looked like he wanted to leave.

“I believe he is the only one who can cheat Death at her favorite game.” Heimdall continued, either oblivious or indifferent to Loki’s mortified expression. He moved in like he might try to clasp Loki by the arm, but Loki shied away ever-so-subtly, staying out of reach. Bruce made a mental note.

“You don’t have to decide now,” Heimdall advised. His voice was kind, but his eyes burned like a tiger's, merciless and inescapable. “But I know you’re ready to lead.”

For some reason that vote of confidence made Loki instantly livid. “And I know how you know that,” he hissed in accusation, a tremor in his voice. “You _saw._ ”

The sudden shift in energy from defeated to enraged was making Bruce sweat. Hulk was feeling some of this, whatever it was, and Bruce didn’t like it one bit.

“You saw everything,” Loki began to rant. “Heard everything. I knew it. You saw what I was groomed for, what I was put in place to do. Ready to lead an army?” he scoffed, and shook his head. “No. I will not be leading any more armies, not even my own.”

_Good_ , thought Bruce firmly from the other side of his mind, and then felt slightly guilty for it. Maybe Loki was serious about having learned something. And maybe the lesson had been rough.

Heimdall stared at Loki for a solemn moment. “Go on,” Loki taunted. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I was hidden from your sight. Tell me you looked away.”

Heimdall’s silence spoke volumes. “…You are not a prisoner here,” Heimdall said at last. “You are the brother of my king. You are a king yourself. You are everything you have made yourself to be, and our best hope against the Goddess of Death. I will support you in the fight ahead.”

Loki narrowed his eyes. “ _Thanks_ ,” he said, and made the word sound like a knife.

_Not good,_ Bruce thought to himself, feeling queasy and hungry and wanting to rub his face. _Not good at all._

***

Thor, meanwhile, had been dreaming. Or at least he was pretty sure it was dreaming—it didn’t feel like being dead, not exactly. Not that he could remember what being dead felt like, but he knew he _had_ been dead for at least a second or two, maybe three, back on Earth. He was sure that he’d recognize the feeling, if he ever experienced being dead again. This odd lifelessness, whatever it was, wasn’t quite death.

Gradually he became aware of a voice, somewhere in the dark around him. “ _Some of us were given better gifts than others,_ ” it said, and he recognized the voice of his sister. So this was her doing—she’d paralyzed him, blinded him. Thor couldn’t feel his body at all, wasn’t even sure if he had one anymore. Was he breathing? He couldn’t tell. Hela was talking about Odin, talking about Mjolnir—and then another voice spoke up.

_Loki!_ That’s right—Loki was alive, Loki was here, he came with the Statesman from Sakaar. Whatever Hela had done to Thor, Loki could undo. Thor wanted to call out to him, but he couldn’t make a sound. He tried to reach out with his thoughts, begging Loki to talk directly into his mind the way he used to when they were very young, before Odin forbade it.

“ _Thor’s going to be dying very gradually for me for a very long time_ ,” Hela was saying, with a cat-in-the-cream sort of purr. Thor’s reaction to that was a happy thought of _oh, good,_ because it confirmed that he really wasn’t dead, and also that he wasn’t in danger of being killed anytime soon. If he’d been able to, he would have grinned in relief at all that great news.

But he couldn’t grin, couldn’t do anything outside his own mind. _Loki,_ he thought desperately. _Please let me know if you can hear me. I’m sorry I left you behind on Sakaar—but not that sorry, I mean, you kind of deserved it — but anyway, I’m really glad you made it out of there, and brought the ship to save everybody, and please, please, please tell me you can hear me._

He stopped to listen. There was no answer from Loki, but Thor could hear him and Hela talking about Heimdall’s mothers for some reason. Thor was too preoccupied with his own strange semi-conscious situation to really follow their conversation, but the mention of Heimdall gave Thor another idea. Heimdall could see and hear everything in the universe, so, maybe somehow he could hear Thor now, even if Loki could not. It was a long shot, since Thor was pretty sure Heimdall couldn’t hear thoughts, but it was all he had at the moment. He went for it.

_Come on, Heimdall, can you hear me?_ Thor wondered into the bizarre darkness of his present existence, but received no response. He tried mentally reaching out a few more times. At last, he gave up, just in time to realize that Loki was threatening, rather awesomely, to totally outdo Odin when it came to locking Hela away for a substantial portion of eternity.

_Wait_ —from the recesses of Thor’s mind came an unexpectedly poignant fear. _Loki, when you lock her up, don’t lock me up with her!_ Why this thought leapt unbidden from his subconscious, he did not know—it had been a gut reaction of sorts, with no definable basis in reality. In any case, it was a terrifying thought.

Abruptly, Thor got the idea that it was raining. He couldn't feel anything--but he had an idea, a concept of rain. This was all too weird. He wished he could focus more clearly on whatever Loki was saying, in case it was important. From the cadence and inflection of his brother’s voice, it sounded like pretty standard Loki stuff: just a little bit scary, but also kind of captivating. He was either trying to intimidate Hela or he was straight-out cursing her for a thousand years; ‘may your socks be full of needles and your undershirt full of slugs.’ That sort of thing.

Then Hela made a horrible sound, followed by a mangled growl of “ _Skurge… you traitor!_ ”

So Skurge was there too, wherever ‘there’ was, with Loki and Hela and Heimdall—who else was around? Valkyrie? Bruce? Korg? Was there a chance any of them could hear his thoughts? Could sense his continued consciousness? He doubted it, but resolved to call out to them anyway.

And then he felt something, and the pieces he’d been missing tumbled into place. Hela grabbed his wrist—so he still had a body after all. Now he was able to feel that he was lying down, on what felt like a bed. And then she drew energy out of him, taking it as easily as pouring water from a cup. He had no mechanism for stopping her. It was like his power wasn’t his own anymore—it was hers, and he was just a convenient vessel.

_Okay, so, that was weird,_ he thought, taking stock as Hela released her grip. He’d never felt anything like that before. _Little uncomfortable, but could be worse. Didn’t even hurt._

Thor listened, and felt a stab of disappointment when he could no longer hear Loki’s voice. After another moment of silence, he concluded that he was alone with Hela. Not long after, Hela began muttering furiously to herself, pacing back and forth judging by the clack of her heels and the way her voice drifted around the room. Her voice was a manic whisper. He caught a few critical words—“Jotun” spat out in disgust, “war” inhaled in sinister excitement, “brother” mentioned with a cruel twist of a laugh.

Eventually Hela fell silent, and though Thor was still unable to see, his skin prickled at the sensation that she was looming over him.

“Oh,” she said, drawing the syllable out just a half-beat too long. “Are you actually awake?”

Thor had no way to respond to that, but he frantically told himself to pretend to be asleep anyway.

“Hmm,” Hela murmured, and he felt her hand on his wrist again, then trailing up his arm. “I rather hope you are,” she drawled, her voice luxuriating over the words. “Show me,” she commanded. “Open your eyes.”

Thor tried to ignore that, but one of his eyes opened anyway—and then he remembered that one eye was all he had. Now he could feel the weight of the patch she’d placed on him, and the ache of the empty socket beneath it. Slowly, begrudgingly, he stared up at his sister’s smirk.

“Good morning,” Hela crooned, smiling wide. “You may speak.”

“Let me go,” Thor said immediately.

“Impossible,” she replied. “You’re part of me now.”

“Really sure I’m not,” Thor told her, scrunching up his face.

“You’ll get used to the idea eventually,” she assured him. “We are one.”

“Um, no,” Thor stated. “That’s not happening.” He tried to struggle free, but he couldn’t move an inch.

“On the contrary,” Hela’s eyes gleamed. “It’s already done.”

Thor heaved a sigh. “...I’m going to hope you’re talking about that weird lightning thing when you kissed me and not any other sort of ritual I may have missed in the aftermath.”

“Ugh,” Hela scoffed in disgust. “I didn’t kiss you. I sucked out the essence of your godhood.”

Thor made a face. “That… sounds so much worse.”

“Oh, please,” Hela rolled her eyes. “I’ve no interest in your body, only your power. There’s no need to be vulgar.”

“Great,” Thor frowned, still not quite sure how creeped-out he ought to be. “…I suppose now you’ll want to, um, tell me your evil plan?”

“Naturally,” Hela said in her most eloquent voice. “We’re going to conquer the universe, you and I, slaughtering all who stand in our way. Starting with what I can only assume to be a scraggly band of half-feral Jotuns, led by our very own scraggly, half-feral brother.”

“…Loki’s going to Jotunheim?” Thor asked. Something seemed wrong about that.

“I’m tracking their wretched ship,” Hela pronounced, each syllable sharp enough to slice an apple. “If they aren’t going to Jotunheim, they’re going to die in space.”

Thor frowned. He wished more than anything that he was aboard the Statesman now. Loki had managed to hold things together on Asgard, all by himself, for four years—but if he was going Jotunheim, something told Thor that his brother was going to need all the help he could get.

***

Back on the bridge of the Statesman, Loki glared at Heimdall, turned on his heel, and walked out.

Bruce took one look at the gatekeeper’s glowing eyes, repressed a shiver, and followed Loki. They didn’t make it far down the corridor before Valkyrie ambushed them. She pressed the blade of her sword across Loki’s neck, who reacted as if this were such an expected occurrence that it barely registered with him at all.

“You utter bastard,” Valkyrie seethed. “You want to explain why I just woke up on the floor in your room?”

“Hey,” Bruce said cautiously, stepping forward and intervening as best he could. “Not now, okay?”

She lowered her glare to consider Bruce’s pleading expression, and to Bruce’s relief, her own expression softened. With a final glance of disgust at Loki, she sheathed her sword.

“Gods, your face. You look just like the big guy,” she said to Bruce. “I can’t believe I didn’t realize it back on Sakaar.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you either,” Bruce said. “I get the feeling that you kind of took care of me. Of us. Hulk doesn’t have many people who’d do that for him.”

“Is that right?” She scowled and nodded up towards Loki. “This one made it sound like Hulk’s got lots of friends, at least on Earth. Not that I have any reason to think he was telling the truth.”

Bruce looked surprised, but he knew what Loki must’ve meant, if he said Hulk had friends. “Oh, well, maybe,” he said in deference. “I mean, compared to Loki…”

He let the feeble quip expire in the half-hearted spirit it was intended, and Valkyrie rolled her eyes. Loki was staring dispassionately down the hallway. “Can you just give him a break, just this once?” Bruce asked imploringly.

“Fine,” she muttered. “I’ll let him off the hook for now, but only as a favor to you, understand?”

“Got it,” Bruce nodded, feeling incredibly grateful that she’d allowed him to talk her down.

Valkyrie gave Bruce a sour frown to discourage him from getting too sappy about all this, lashed a final unspoken warning at Loki that he ought to stay out of her way or else, and stormed past them towards the bridge.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Loki said once she was gone.

“Yeah, but I’m not sorry I did,” Bruce muttered.

Loki looked him over, searching for the catch that would spring the trap, and seemed annoyed when he couldn’t find it.

“Come on,” he said at length. “Let’s talk in private.”

Bruce felt just a tiny bit anxious at that invitation. And he was starving, but that was irrelevant. 

“Um, okay,” he agreed, and followed Loki back to his room--which had been utterly trashed in Loki’s absence, no doubt by the angry Valkyrie when she’d deduced that she’d been drugged. The table and chairs had been hacked to pieces, the alcohol bottles smashed, and the bunk with its bedding had been so thoroughly demolished it looked like it had exploded.

Suddenly it made a lot of sense that Hulk and Valkyrie had formed a bond. 

Loki made some minor noise of disapproval and, right before Bruce’s eyes, the furniture began to magically set itself to rights.

“What the--” Bruce exclaimed, transfixed by the shards of glass reassembling themselves into bottles. “This is insane. How are you doing this?”

Loki sat down on the bed as the shredded covers reformed themselves beneath him. “You’re easily impressed,” he remarked neutrally. “This sort of magic is trivial.”

“But making that guy take a swing at Hela with his axe, that was serious, right?” Bruce guessed, sitting on a chair that had been hopelessly mangled a moment ago.

Loki nodded. “What’s even more ‘serious’ is that I can hide myself and anyone in my immediate vicinity from Heimdall’s sight, whenever I wish.” He held up a hand and smirked. “Just like this.” He snapped his fingers and a thin golden flash filled the room, fizzling out at the seams of the floor and ceiling. 

Bruce took a few seconds to process. “So, Heimdall sees everything, right? But you can hide from him… and you didn’t, earlier… so that means you’re only doing it now out of spite.”

Loki leaned back against the wall, bringing his feet up onto the bed and crossing his boots at the ankles. “I agree it may be a bit childish of me to hide from him now, but I honestly don’t care.” 

As a scientist, Bruce had a talent for identifying and plucking out the knots of a problem, and there was a tangle here which he knew he had to unravel. “Okay. What’s the deal with you and Heimdall?” Bruce asked bluntly. “I get that you blame him for not intervening, back when you were all, you know, crazy-evil, but right now he seems like he totally wants to support you. What am I missing?”

Loki took a deep breath and looked up at the ceiling, brow furrowing. “Depends on how much you already know. After everything that happened, after that dreadful _elf_ killed my mother, I was determined to punish three people: Odin, Thor, and Heimdall. Thor was the easiest, of course—all I had to do was pretend to die. Ruining the Allfather’s life was a little bit trickier, but not by much. Heimdall, on the other hand, evaded me for years. I’d been hunting for him, ever since I banished Odin to Earth. And if I’d caught him, I would’ve beheaded him.”

“Seems a bit harsh,” Bruce remarked, but Loki only shrugged.

“Heimdall tried to cut me down once before. When I was dragged to Asgard in chains, he advised my father to execute me. When Heimdall knew better than anyone whether mercy should have been warranted, only my mother spoke to spare my life.”

“What about Thor?” Bruce wondered immediately.

“Thor.” Loki pronounced the syllable like a sentence. “Odin had him brainwashed into thinking I was some sort of tragically diseased pet. In that state of mind, Thor would have killed me himself.”

“No way,” Bruce shook his head. “I don’t believe that.”

Loki’s smile was tight. “He would’ve wept for days, but he would have done what Odin required of him. He told me so himself.”

“There’s gotta be more to the story,” Bruce insisted. 

“Oh, there is,” Loki said, eyebrows high. “There’s always more to the story. But all that matters now is that we rescue Thor from Hela.”

“And you’re gonna have to work together with Heimdall to do that,” Bruce surmised. “And… look, no offense, but I’m just going to ask. Why do I get the impression that you’re afraid of him?”

Loki locked eyes with Bruce. “Because his power outmatches mine. Of course I fear him.” 

It was such a straightforward answer that it took Bruce completely by surprise. If he wasn’t so sure that the pang in his stomach had been caused by hunger, he might have thought that Loki’s answer had provoked a bit of a response from Hulk, too. “You’re afraid of Heimdall because he’s stronger than you?” Bruce echoed, and then he almost laughed.

“Why is that funny?” Loki wondered. “I thought you of all people might understand, given your own relationship with… strength.” 

“Don’t worry, I get it,” Bruce assured him. “I just never imagined it could be something so simple. I mean, you both have such insanely powerful magic. But you have a common goal - you should be able to call a truce and cooperate, right?”

Loki looked back up at the ceiling. “Heimdall and I are water and oil,” he said. “His magic and mine, his nature and mine—we don’t mix.”

“Well, you could,” Bruce joked lamely. “You just need an emulsifier.”

There was a beat, and then Loki tensed and fixed Bruce with a blank stare. “An emulsifier,” he repeated, voice flat.

“Yeah, you know, to shake things up?” Bruce felt a little sweaty; hopefully he hadn’t said something too offensive. “To mix… oil and water?”

Abruptly Loki seemed to realize it had been a sort of a bad joke and not a serious suggestion. He relaxed a bit and returned his gaze upwards.

“So… what now?” Bruce asked awkwardly, when Loki hadn’t said anything for a minute or so. 

“Now, we brainstorm ways to cheat death,” Loki said, completely casual. 

Bruce’s stomach chose that moment to grumble so loudly it might have been Hulk’s stomach instead. “Sorry,” he muttered in response to Loki’s perturbed expression. “Haven’t eaten since you saw me stuffing my face in Valkyrie’s apartment. I don’t even know how long ago that was.”

“About sixteen hours,” Loki informed him. 

“Oh man.” Bruce winced. Sixteen hours, and he’d turned into the Hulk and back during that time and had nothing but a questionable dose of alcohol to resupply his energy. Through incidental conversations earlier he’d learned that most of the refugees hadn’t eaten in days, which certainly didn’t make him feel any better. “Um… I probably should have asked this sooner, but, how long until we get to Jotunheim?” 

“Two more days,” Loki said. Bruce huffed out a pained breath. 

“Well, I’m not gonna die, but I’m not gonna be happy either,” he muttered. 

Loki sat up and gave him an odd look, eyes narrowed. “Ask,” he directed.

Bruce didn’t follow. “...Ask what?” 

Loki stared at him harder, as if he couldn’t quite believe that Bruce didn’t know what question he expected. When all he got was Bruce’s wide and astonishingly innocent eyes in return, he gave up. “When it finally occurs to you,” he said dismissively. “Ask.” 

“Okay…” thoughts began to race in loops around Bruce’s brain. What was supposed to occur to him? What was he supposed to ask? 

His stomach rumbled again, and he got it. “Oh! Food. Of course.” He looked at Loki, his face heating with embarrassment. “Can you… I mean, do you have any food?”

Loki tossed him a yellow apple out of thin air, and Bruce held it in both hands, gaping at it in slack-jawed wonder. Then he looked up, his face a storm of hopeful queries. “...Is there enough for everybody?” he asked. “I mean, can you feed the whole ship? Can you feed a whole planet? Just how magical are you??” 

“As much as I’d love to preserve the mystery for you, no, I can’t feed the whole ship. I’ve only got a few of those, and a plate of biscuits that are probably stale, but I’ll share them with you if you like, because,” he blinked and fell quiet, suddenly unwilling to finish his thought. 

“Because you want my help with the brainstorming,” Bruce suggested amiably, saving Loki from admitting he was returning Bruce’s kindness. “And I’m not so great at brainstorming on an empty stomach.”

“And as the only human aboard, you’re likely the hungriest out of all of us,” Loki added. 

“Well... thank you,” Bruce said, examining the apple. The color seemed a little too intense. He quirked an eyebrow. “Wait. If I eat this, is it one of those things where I have to spend six months of the year in the underworld or something?”

Loki shook his head, grinning brightly. “Wrong mythology, and that was a pomegranate, but I do know what you mean, and no. You won’t need to be roused from supernatural slumber by true love’s kiss or anything either, I promise. It’s just an ordinary apple.” 

An ordinary apple, Bruce thought, handed to him out of a magical dimension by the God of Mischief on a ginormous starship on the other side of the universe. Just an ordinary apple...and it did look delicious. “...No side effects of immortality or anything?” Bruce double-checked. 

“Now, that is the right mythology, but the wrong particular apple, in this case.” 

Bruce blinked. “For real? You have actual apples of immortality?” 

“I’m sure I have one or two, lying about,” Loki said in a pleasant voice. 

Bruce looked completely scandalized. “Any chance we could use them against your sister? Immortality’s a pretty good way to cheat death, right?” 

“Hmm.” Loki considered it, thinking intently. “I’m not sure, but at this stage I won’t throw anything out. It’s a valid idea. What else have you got?”

Bruce took a bite of the apple, chewed, and the instant thrill of sugar on his tongue helped his imagination run wild. “Fountain of youth? Got one of those?”

“No, but that’s a similar concept to the apples, I think.” 

“Let’s see… how can you cheat death…” Bruce was getting into this now, thinking aloud between big crunchy, juicy bites. “Time travel? Probably too dangerous. Antioxidants? Not dangerous enough. Maybe something like reincarnation? Does it count as cheating death if only your soul survives? No idea. Ok. So, you can probably cheat death with magic, like, if you could respawn like in a video game, just, keep reappearing every time you get killed…” 

Loki was nodding carefully, following Bruce’s train of thought. 

“Wait a minute--” Bruce stopped, looked around the room, and laughed. “I’ve got it. We’re in a spaceship. Interstellar travel--you mentioned it yourself!” 

“Did I?” Loki asked, perplexed. 

“Stasis,” Bruce said triumphantly. “You can cheat death by slowing something down basically to death, and then unfreezing it later. I mean, it hasn’t been proven to work for humans, unless you count Steve Rogers--but there are plenty of species that can be frozen totally solid and then brought back to life. If that’s not cheating death, I don’t know what is.” 

Loki looked at him in incredulous awe. “...You might be onto something,” he allowed, with an odd dip of his eyebrows. “If only I had some source of, say, an infinite icy wind capable of freezing an entire planet all at once.” 

Bruce sighed, discouraged. “Yeah, I guess that’s ridiculous. Just letting my brain get carried away. Sorry.”

“No, Doctor Banner, no,” Loki laughed, and sat up. “Bruce. I already have it. I have it right here.” 

“...Have what?” Bruce asked cautiously. 

Loki smiled, stood up, and placed the Casket of Ancient Winters onto the table in front of Bruce, who jumped only a little bit when it appeared. “What the! Loki--is that the Tesseract?!” 

“It is not. Admittedly, it’s a similar color and shape, but this is something different.” 

Bruce said the first thing that came to his mind. “Does Heimdall know you have it?!”

Loki’s eyes gleamed, reflecting the turbulent blue of the box he’d just summoned out of nowhere. “Yes,” he replied with emphasis. “Heimdall knows better than anyone.”

Bruce remembered there was more to the story, and decided that for the moment, he didn’t want to know.


	4. The Leopard and its Spots

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Loki pulled a blade from the stone floor of the throne room and materialized it into Thor’s grasp. _Is this because she said to ‘take a stab at it’?_ Thor wondered crossly, brow furrowing.
> 
> _Yes,_ Loki answered. _I can’t resist._

Bruce carried the plate of biscuits down the corridor, feeling distinctly uncomfortable about being the only person on board in possession of solid food. While most of the gladiators he’d encountered seemed perfectly content with the Grandmaster’s booze as their sole source of nourishment for the journey, Bruce knew there were children aboard with the Asgardian refugees, and he suspected they were hungry. Bruce had been a hungry kid once himself. Even though he knew there wasn’t enough food for everyone he was determined to share what he had with whomever needed it the most.

He was so focused on letting his altruism overpower his green-tinged hunger pangs that he completely missed Valkyrie leaning against a bulkhead, waiting for him.

“Hey,” she said when it was clear that he was one step away from walking right past her.

Bruce lurched away from the unexpected greeting, nearly scattering the biscuits.

“Oh jeez—you scared me,” he exclaimed, wincing at the rush of adrenaline. Hulk had felt that.

“Clearly,” she said, in flat disapproval. She stalked towards him, chin raised, frowning at the plate in his hands. “What’ve you got there?”

“Do… you… do you want one?” Bruce wondered helplessly. He held up the plate like he might hide behind it. Her scrutiny made him feel irrationally guilty, as if he’d been caught violating a direct command.

She sniffed the air in Bruce’s direction, her nose wrinkling. As far as Bruce had been able to tell, the biscuits didn’t actually smell like anything. “Those from Loki?” she asked with maximum suspicion.

Of course they were from Loki. “No, I baked them myself,” Bruce muttered under his breath. She narrowed her eyes at his attitude and selected a biscuit off the plate, pinching it like it might turn into a diseased rodent. After examining it front and back, she crumbled it in her fist.

Hulk didn’t like that. “Hey, don’t do that,” Bruce protested. He swallowed, staying calm, and averted his eyes as she shook the crumbs from her hand onto the floor. As far as provocations went, that had been mild. He made his voice soft. “Please. Don’t waste them.”

“So he’s bribing you with food?” Valkyrie challenged. “That’s cute. Grandmaster used to do the same thing with the Hulk.”

Bruce scowled, feeling Hulk’s expression on his face as much as his own. He still didn’t really know what had happened to the Hulk on Sakaar. “It’s not a bribe,” he said.

Her eyebrow twitched and she looked him up and down. “What is it then? _Payment?_ Did you _earn_ those treats by being his little friend?”

It was too crass of an accusation to stir up anything other than a sense of disappointment that she’d be that bluntly _mean._ Bruce just stared at her, hoping that in his face she might see a glimpse of someone who had been _her_ friend. After a few seconds, she had the decency to look away.

“Just be careful,” she muttered. “He’s probably up to something.”

“Oh, he is definitely up to something,” Bruce confirmed.

“You don’t have to eat those,” Valkyrie went on, brow crinkling in pseudo-sympathy as she glanced at the innocuous biscuits. “I mean, there’s plenty of grain in the alcohol.”

Bruce froze, a thought streaking across his brain like a meteor. “Grain in the alcohol,” he repeated, and then handed the plate of biscuits to Valkyrie, turned, and ran back to Loki’s cabin.

“Loki!” Bruce called, banging on the door. “Loki—Loki open up!”

The door slid aside and Bruce barged in without waiting for an invitation. “Loki—you can do it,” Bruce exclaimed, practically falling over himself in his rush to explain his sudden idea. “You can feed the whole ship!”

Loki frowned in such honest confusion he almost looked a bit like Thor. “…I could give everyone the illusion of food,” he ventured. “Make everyone believe they are eating, but…”

Bruce shook his head. “No, no. You can do it for real. Beer is liquid bread, right? There’s grain in the alcohol. Starches—sugars. Right? And you can turn one thing into another!”

Loki blinked, catching on. “…Within reason,” he cautioned.

“Reason?! What are you talking about, _reason?_ Your whole deal is like real, actual magic! You said you could turn Hela into a _frog!_ ” Bruce was nearly bouncing up and down with excitement, and it seemed to be giving Loki a headache.

“A frog, yes, but she’d still be Hela, even if she was a frog,” Loki said, a crease between his brows. “And she’d be able to revert to her Aesir form eventually, I have no doubt. Let me ask you--do you think I could turn my sister into a single grain of sand and blink her away to the bottom of an ocean? Could I turn her into the flame on a candle and have a stray gust of wind snuff her out?”

Bruce’s mouth fell open. “I don’t know, man. Could you?”

“No,” Loki answered, eyes narrowed. “If I could do anything like that, I would have done it already. Look, the vast majority of what I do is not what it appears, all right? Tricks. Illusions. I thought you’d already muddled that out.”

“But changing grain into alcohol isn’t an illusion,” Bruce countered. “Now all you have to do is change it back. I _know_ you have enough magic for that much, at least.”

For one tight-lipped moment, Loki looked like he might refuse. Then his shoulders slumped. “All right,” he agreed. “I’ll turn half the beer into bread, half the wine into grapes and so forth.”

“Really?” Bruce asked breathlessly, imagining a thousand fresh-baked loaves. “You really can, and, you really will? You mean it?”

Loki considered Bruce’s wide-eyed awe as though it were a puzzle to solve, and eventually settled on a nod and a smile as an appropriate counter-move. “It’s done,” he pronounced. “Plenty of libations left for those who want them, and for anyone preferring a rather bland and slightly malty bread, there’s enough of that now to last us two more days at least.”

“Wow,” Bruce breathed, completely impressed. “So—just like that, real food? But if it was that easy, why didn’t you do it before?”

“Because I didn’t think of it,” Loki admitted. He quirked an eyebrow. “Sometimes the hardest part of magic is imagining how to use it.”

“Ha,” Bruce grinned. “It’s the same, in what I do. At least, in the theoretical stuff—just imagining it, thinking something up for the first time when no one’s thought of it before, that’s the hard part.”

“Hm,” said Loki, his glance falling to the floor. There was an awkward beat as Bruce missed his cue to excuse himself. “Tell you what,” Loki offered after a pause. “Why don’t you go enjoy your cakes and ale, get some rest, and come back tomorrow? By then, Hela should think us too far away for me to contact Thor.”

Bruce blinked. “So… that means you’re gonna contact Thor?”

A shadow fell across Loki’s face. “I’m going to try,” he resolved.

***

Bruce found his own cabin, ate, showered, and slept. He dreamed of leaping to his death from the Commodore, and woke in the split-second before impact, the Hulk chuckling darkly in the back of his mind. He took another shower, ate another meal, and then wandered the ship, unsure of how much time had passed and wondering when Loki would consider it to be ‘tomorrow’.

Eventually, he made his way to the cargo hold where groups of refugees had settled down together rather than disperse to the smaller cabins on the higher decks. The appearance of magic bread in nearly every crate and cupboard on the ship (and the corresponding disappearance of a substantial amount of alcohol) had not been greeted with the sort of amazed gratefulness Bruce had expected—more of a grim acceptance. Bruce supposed a few loaves of bread were a poor consolation for people who had lost everything, but he also thought he heard a few grumbles about the lack of butter.

“What’s with these people?” Bruce muttered to Korg, as one elderly Asgardian tottered by with a half-eaten slice, complaining about the texture of the crust. “I get that Thor and Loki were royalty, but…were all of them?”

“I think it’s a fair assumption that they consider themselves to be a sort of nobility, sure,” Korg mused. “Members of an elite society… long lives, no poverty, war as more of a sport than a tragedy. They had more Kronans in their dungeons than Asgardians—that should tell you something. Prided themselves on their strength, called their king the ‘God of Wisdom’ for a few millennia… thought they were better than everyone. Yeah man, they were a privileged bunch.”

“How the mighty have fallen, eh?” Bruce remarked.

“Only, it’s more like they’ve been knocked down, if you think about it,” Korg went on, and launched into a peculiarly empathetic philosophical ramble, about which Bruce didn’t know enough intergalactic history to follow.

When a shimmery-edged copy of Loki stepped out of a nearby wall, interrupting Korg mid-sentence, it was a relief. Bruce scrambled to his feet.

“If you’re available,” Loki’s copy said to Bruce, with a carefully veiled note of urgency. It didn’t finish the sentence. 

“Yeah, I’ll be right there,” Bruce huffed. The facsimile nodded, exiting the way it had appeared.

***

Bruce hurried to Loki’s cabin, not sure what to expect. “Okay, I’m here,” Bruce announced as the door slid shut behind him. “How can I help?”

A dozen expressions flickered across Loki’s face before settling on something approximating neutral, which Bruce interpreted to mean as Loki feeling anxious.

“Do you remember, last night, how I almost kidnapped you and Valkyrie to take you back to Asgard?” Loki asked.

Of course Bruce remembered that. “…You needed someone to talk you out of it?” Bruce prompted.

“This is similar,” said Loki. “By being here, you might help me avoid certain choices.”

There was a beat. “Really?” Bruce blinked, baffled that he might hold such a level of influence over Loki. “I mean, I’ll try my best, but… what sort of choices are we talking about?”

Loki sighed. “Depending on how this works, I might be tempted to take control of Thor’s mind to manipulate him against Hela, as I tried to do with Skurge.”

Now it was Bruce’s turn to play expression roulette. He settled on _concerned_. “So, if you do that and it works, Hela’s defeated, and then Thor gets his brain back, right?”

“Right,” Loki acknowledged with a frown. “Well? Aren’t you horrified that I’d consider it? Criminal enough when it’s that traitorous Skurge—unconscionable when it’s the one person who’d be incapable of hating me for it.”

Bruce nodded carefully, absorbing that. “I’m glad you told me,” he said at last. “And I can see why you’d be tempted to try it. But also, I’m relieved, because I think you’ve already decided not to.”

Loki slowed his breathing, reassured that Bruce would serve as an effective anchor of conscience after all. “All right,” he said and waved a silver circle into the air. “This is a scrying mirror. If I’m able to see Thor through it, then I’ll try and speak to him, mind to mind. I’m not sure if you’ll be able to see or hear anything that’s going on, and I’m not sure how long it will take, but please don’t leave.” Loki looked a little embarrassed to have made that request, but there it was. “I haven’t done this in a long time and I’d rather not do it alone.”

“Why? Will it hurt?” Bruce asked instinctively, his forehead wrinkled in worry.

Loki regarded Bruce with supernatural stillness, debating how much to tell him. So far, Loki had been more forthcoming with Bruce than with anyone else in recent memory, and that approach seemed to be working for him. 

“I was very young when I mastered telepathy, specifically with Thor,” Loki explained, voice low. “Our father said it was dangerous, that I had learned it too fast, that I shouldn’t be able to do it. I suppose he thought I might attempt something egregious, might turn Thor against him or irreparably damage or enslave Thor’s mind. Odin knew all along what I was, after all. He knew I was a--” Loki stopped, blinked, and his voice mellowed. “Well, you know.”

Bruce _did_ know. “...My father thought the same thing about me,” he sympathized. “That I was dangerous and unnatural, that I learned things too fast and knew things I shouldn’t. So, yeah. I get it.”

“I thought you might. Granted, your father was worlds worse than mine, based on what I gleaned from SHIELD’s records. I knew Odin had more love for Thor, but he never made me feel hated. I wasn’t an accident, I was… a strategic acquisition.”

“You were wanted,” Bruce summarized. Loki must’ve read the interview that Brian Banner had given from prison. Bruce had only been able to read half of that himself. Even after all these years, his father’s hatred was impossible to confront.

Loki hesitated, biting his lip. “Sorry,” he offered, sounding sincere. “I meant no offense.”

“It’s fine,” Bruce shook his head, eyes soft. “So what happened with the, uh, the telepathy stuff?”

Loki looked Bruce over, re-evaluating how much to share, and then continued carefully. “…Odin made me unlearn it.”

Bruce winced.

“And when, unintentionally, I reestablished the link, Odin made me unlearn it again.”

“Damn,” Bruce whispered.

“The third time I mastered the skill,” Loki said slowly, “When I knew it was forbidden, but believed we were old enough to keep it a secret, just for ourselves, Thor…” he paused, feeling the sting of this old wound all over again. “Thor turned me in. Odin had told him to report it, if I ever tried to speak to his mind again. And my brother, ever dutiful, handed me over for punishment like a dirty rag for washing.”

“Wow,” said Bruce.

“That was the last time,” Loki concluded. He smiled. “There were plenty of other offenses committed, plenty of far worse transgressions, and even the odd phase when I was in earnest the more loyal son. Truly, Thor earned more than his share of punishments. But I haven’t tried to talk to Thor this way since that last, disastrous incident. That’s why I think it might help to have a witness present. Your belief in my better intentions, and my interest in not betraying that belief prematurely, should be a counterweight to any sort of… any thoughts of…” he seemed to run out of explanation.

“…Revenge?” Bruce guessed. “Rage? The impulse to do something even though you know it’s going to make everything worse?”

“Yes,” Loki said in relief. “All the above.”

Bruce raised a tentative finger in the air. “Uhh, I’m with you so far, I really am, but you do know you just said you have an interest in not betraying me _prematurely,_ right? Which kind of implies you think there’s going to be an appropriate time, somewhere down the line, where betraying me is going to be your best move.”

“Of course,” Loki admitted, not missing a beat. “Does that surprise you? Surely you know that ancient thing about the leopard and its spots?”

“Yeah, but Loki, I also know that _recent_ thing about the beer and the bread. If anybody can change something, for real, it’s you.”

If Bruce didn’t know better, he might’ve thought that Loki was genuinely flattered. “Thor said something like that to me on Sakaar,” Loki recalled fondly. Resolute, he nodded at Bruce. “You’re definitely the right person to keep me in check.”

Loki took a breath and turned to the scrying mirror. Bruce quietly chose a seat off to the side, where he could see Loki’s face in profile. He could also catch a sidelong glance at the mirror, if it showed anything interesting.

The mirror rippled like something Bruce had seen in a movie once, and then there was Thor, the image as clear as a TV screen.

Wearing that all-black armor with that black patch over his missing eye, Bruce’s friend and Loki’s brother was sitting on the now all-black throne of Asgard—looking bored, apparently alone and unaware that he was under observation. He was trotting a chess piece across the arm of the massive chair, and Bruce got the impression Thor was giving it a voice in his head.

It was definitely not how any sort of god or king or grown man would wish to be seen, caught playing with a makeshift toy like a child in his father’s office, but when Bruce checked Loki’s face for a reaction to the comical scene they’d interrupted, he was taken aback.

Loki was looking at Thor, through the mirror, across the lightyears, with an expression that was as difficult to describe as it was unmistakable. It might’ve been easy to call it _love,_ but it was tinged with sadness.

Suddenly Bruce remembered where he’d seen a look like that before. Betty had once found a photograph of her childhood dog, the faithful companion she’d known and loved for the first sixteen years of her life. She’d stared at that photo for a long moment, with the same look in her eyes that Loki had now. It was a look that said, _You were my whole world,_ and _I’d give anything to have you back._ Bruce felt like he was intruding, just by being in the room.

Loki blinked, breaking the spell, and his expression hardened. Bruce realized he was calling out to his brother.

Right on cue, Thor sat up excitedly, and Bruce could tell by the looks on both brothers’ faces the moment the connection worked. Loki had done it; they were linked as they’d been in childhood. Without saying a single word aloud, they were communicating with total fluency now—joy on Thor’s face was followed by anger on Loki’s, answered by confusion from Thor, and then indignation. Abruptly Loki cast a guilty look at Bruce and visibly reined-in his emotions, looking at Thor as if committed to giving him a rather to-the-point lecture. Thor shook his head once or twice, and eventually reached down by his feet to rattle a hefty chain. Bruce noticed for the first time that Thor had shackles around his ankles, literally chained to the throne.

Loki made an exasperated little noise and resumed his determined-to-impart-information expression. Thor seemed to be listening intently, until suddenly the sound of a door banging open startled him—and Bruce, too.

Hela swept into view of the scrying mirror, facing Thor. “Down,” she snapped. Thor relinquished his position on the throne, kneeling stoically beside it instead.

Hela hummed in satisfaction and eased herself onto the seat with at least five full seconds worth of unnecessary posing and stretching. “Good of you to keep this warm for me,” Hela remarked to Thor, and then leaned over to ruffle Thor’s hair. It seemed to Bruce like she shouldn’t have been able to reach that far, but somehow, she had. “Good and obedient,” she purred, and Thor hung his head, looking sulkily off to the side.

“I’m afraid I’m bored,” Hela declared as though she were making an announcement to a room full of thousands of people instead of just her one enslaved brother. “There just isn’t anyone left around here to _kill._ Except you and Skurge, and I’m saving Skurge for a something special. So that means…you’re up.”

She looked at Thor expectantly, and then casually crossed one leg over the other, in a way that reminded both Loki and Thor, creepily, and in unison, of the Grandmaster.

“Do you mean to kill me now?” Thor wondered awkwardly.

Hela rolled her eyes so far back that only the whites showed, dramatically, for a little bit too long. “No, you fool,” she said, her icy irises falling back into place and their pupils narrowing dangerously. “I need you to enter _tain_ me. Dis _tract_ me. Pass some of this wretched time until I take you by the hands and waltz you down the Bifrost into our very first _war._ I think we’ll build a tower when we’re through, constructed entirely of Jotun _spines_. As a sort of… a commemoration. Then perhaps I’ll keep you locked away inside it, at the very tip-top, a hundred floors high. How many spines do you think we’ll need?”

Thor sighed. “I don’t know, how about a million?” he asked, clearly having no interest in this subject.

“A _million_ ,” Hela enunciated as if each syllable of that word was her favorite sound to say. Then she gave an exaggerated pout. “Now I’m sad because we need a _million_ —but the Jotuns are a cowardly, spineless lot, so we’ll be hard pressed to find even one!” she chuckled haughtily at her own terrible joke.

“Ha. Ha,” Thor said flatly. “Hilarious.”

“Why, brother, do you not find me funny?” Hela asked mockingly.

“I do not,” Thor confirmed.

She revamped her pout, but this time her eyes conveyed an ulterior motive. “And, do you not find me beautiful?”

“Ehh,” Thor scrunched up his face. “I suppose I’m not the best person to claim that good looks don’t run in the family,” he came up with at last.

She laughed again, lower in pitch, her lips stretched in a broad grin. “As a starting point, that will do,” she purred.

Thor blinked at her. “…Starting point?” 

“Yes, for you to start serving your purpose,” Hela informed him, as though it were a regal decree. “You may begin.”

“Ugh, this is...really creepy,” Thor muttered. “What should I do?”

He’d said that aloud, but meant it for Loki.

“Worship me,” Hela instructed, with a particular wiggle of her shoulders. She raised her chin. “Go on…let me hear it. Don’t hold back. Really… _express_ your feelings.”

Thor’s chest heaved up and down, and, seeing no other option, he started off on a loud, unenthusiastic note. “Oh, great Hela. Great, big…death…goddess…”

Aboard the Statesman, watching all this, Bruce felt the same second-hand mortification he’d always felt when some jock had been called on in class to give an answer to something they clearly hadn’t cared to learn. Loki, meanwhile, made a sound like an inconvenienced goat.

“You are terrible at this,” Loki said aloud, eyes locked on Thor.

Thor seemed to be rolling the one eye he had left. “Oh Hela, you’re the most…best… at killing people…” he said, while he sent a thought to Loki: _Feel free to jump in._

_Fine, just let me do it,_ Loki thought back at him.

“Hmbglh,” Thor said. Hela frowned at the unintelligible noise he’d just made.

_Relax your mouth, you idiot, I’ve got to talk through it,_ Loki projected furiously, and then made Thor give an awkward cough.

“Excuse me,” Thor said, his expression a bit strained. “Got off to a rough start there, but if I may start over…” Thor looked hopefully up at his sister, who waved a hand.

“I have literally all day,” she proclaimed.

Thor cleared his throat. “Hela, my sister,” he said boldly. “My queen, my goddess. Hela of inestimable greatness, Hela of unconquerable strength. You are the ultimate power in the universe, the culmination of all other energies, the destination of all journeys. All life races towards your eternal embrace, all hearts break before you, all voices fall silent at your almighty command.”

_Laying it on thick, aren’t you,_ Thor thought sullenly.

_Shut up,_ Loki thought back. _Let me work._

“Hmm,” smirked Hela, intrigued. “That’s rather good, isn’t it? Do go on.”

Thor opened his mouth, and more words came flowing out of it. “The strong and the wise surrender their strength and wisdom at your altar, and the brave tremble at the whisper of your name. All life pays you tribute. The bones of our ancestors stand guard in your palace, their souls transfixed by your immortal beauty. All who breathe shall give their last breath to you. All shall know you and despair.”

Hela sat up straighter in her throne. “Oh, I _like_ that,” she enthused. “It’s very…” she waved one hand in a lazy circle in the air, searching for a word. “ _Me,_ ” she concluded, her smile showing all her teeth.

“Shall I keep going?” Thor asked, though there was a bit of a growl in his voice.

“Hmm…” Hela slouched sideways, propped her elbow on the arm of the throne, and poised her thumb on her chin, her forefinger on her cheekbone. “You know, when I was young, there was a sort of an old tradition amongst the nobles, though it’s probably fizzled out by now. There used to be… exaltations, offered in verse.”

“Verse, like a poem?” Thor asked, slightly confused.

Hela smirked. “Like a poem,” she confirmed. “Just a little rhyming couplet or two, nothing too taxing. Why don’t you take a stab at it.”

Back on the Statesman, Loki took a breath. It was too good to pass up. _Thor, I’m putting a knife in your hand,_ he thought rapidly. Thor cringed visibly.

_Please don’t_ , he thought back.

Loki’s eyes flared. _I’m not going to hurt you; I’m giving you a weapon so you can stab Hela!_

Thor put his hands behind his back. Loki pulled a blade from the stone floor of the throne room and materialized it into Thor’s grasp. _Is this because she said to ‘take a stab at it’?_ Thor wondered crossly, brow furrowing.

_Yes,_ Loki answered. _I can’t resist._

Thor sighed. _It’s not going to work,_ he thought morosely.

_But it’s going to be worth it,_ Loki insisted.

“Let’s get this over with,” Thor said aloud. He cleared his throat again, gazing up at his sister. “Hela, supreme,” he began, rather eloquently. “Hela, victorious.”

“Stop,” she said, holding up a hand. She narrowed her eyes. “Are you hiding something behind your back?” her face lit up in a gleeful smile. “Come here,” she said, beckoning to him. “Show it to me.”

Teeth clenched, Thor rose to his feet, evidently against his will, and jerkily presented Hela with the blade that Loki had given him.

“My, my,” Hela mused, taking the knife from his hands. “Our little brother left me with the impression that you couldn’t do any of these sorts of tricks. Maybe he doesn’t know you as well as he thinks. He certainly doesn’t know you as well as I do, does he?”

With one finger she pressed the knife point-first down into the throne, all the way, until it vanished—the throne swallowing it as though it had been pushed into clay rather than solid stone and metal. With the knife gone, she reached out and petted Thor’s hair again. “Nobody knows you as well as your elder sister, after all. My dear brother.”

Thor looked completely miserable and Loki was veritably irate. “Don’t you want to hear the rest of my poem?” Thor blurted out.

“Very well,” Hela said, leaning back. “Regale me.”

“Hela, Supreme,” Thor began again. “Hela, Victorious. Your empire is vast; your armies are glorious.”

“Oh, a little rhyme,” Hela said with a smile. “Good job.”

“No mortal can escape your stench,” Thor went on. “You empty-hearted, putrid wench.”

Loki smirked as Hela’s smile eroded into a teeth-baring snarl.

“ _What,_ ” she spat, and rose to her feet, her many-antlered helm assembling itself around her skull. Wreaths of black smoke began to curl around her, around the throne.

Thor let out the smallest little laugh, as if only then hearing the words he’d said to her—and at that, she lashed out, kicking him in the chest. He went tumbling backwards, down the steps, the chains around his ankles preventing him from rolling too far away.

Hela came down on him with a furious scream, kicking him and stomping on his back with the heel of her foot while he tried his best to protect his head with his arms.

Watching this assault, Bruce felt the veins in his hands turning green, and looked away, ashamed.

Loki winced. _Gods, Thor, I’m sorry,_ Loki thought into his brother’s mind. _I didn’t know she’d take it this hard. I thought she might laugh at it, honestly._

_No, it’s okay,_ Thor assured him. In his thoughts, Loki could hear the hint of Thor’s laughter. _You were right—it was totally worth it!_

Hela kicked Thor in the face. _Ow,_ Thor thought, hiding his smile against the floor. _Still worth it,_ he thought towards his brother. He felt blood start to run from his nose, and wiped it with his hand—and then saw it was black. _Uh oh,_ Thor thought. _Loki? I think my blood’s turned black._

_Like hers,_ Loki realized, and cursed. _She’s claimed you. Made you a part of her._

_Can you save me?_ Thor asked.

Loki went still.

_Yes._ He projected the thought towards Thor, but Hela’s foot was faster, already on a collision course with the back of Thor’s skull. At that final kick, Thor’s mind blanked out, Loki’s _Yes_ having nowhere to land, no consciousness to receive it.

The link was cut.


	5. At the Temple of Tombs

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hela and Thor create an army. Loki gets what he doesn't want.

After he’d been mind-controlled into attacking Hela, Skurge fled—but had only gotten halfway down the hall before he was tackled by a herd of Hela’s undead servants and installed in the dungeon below the palace.

Skurge had spent the first few hours in his cell cursing the day he’d been born. His self-confidence had always been a sham; he knew deep down that his service to Asgard had been far from exemplary.

Skurge had always been selfish, had always lacked honor. The other Asgardians sensed his deficiency and largely avoided him as a result, more or less politely. Skurge wasn’t the sort of person who received invitations. Nobody called on Skurge for his company or wanted his opinion. Asgard had three levels of society: the people who frequented the palace and generated most of the gossip about the royal family, the commoners who lived below the palace and reveled in that gossip, and Skurge, who seemed to be in a caste all his own, a single outcast from an otherwise close-knit society.

The day Skurge had been hand-selected by “Odin” as Heimdall’s replacement had been the best day of his life. The day he’d sworn himself to Hela, he now understood, had been the worst. Every other Asgardian warrior had been honorable enough to die that day—why hadn’t Skurge? He was truly the lowest of them all. How laughable that he’d acted to preserve something as worthless as his own dishonorable life.

Hela would kill him, he had no doubt—and he wasn’t naïve enough to hope that it would be quick. He tried to convince himself that he didn’t care, but when a contingent of draugrs arrived to haul him out of his cell, he was overcome with fear. The undead warriors bound Skurge in chains and carried him to the throne room, where he was certain he’d meet his miserable fate.

At first, it looked like Hela and Thor were sitting on the throne together, which seemed off—but as he was carried closer and then forced to his knees at the bottom of the steps, Skurge got a better look at what was going on. Thor was slumped back, his chin tipped forward onto his chest, either dead or unconscious. He looked like one of the legendary old kings who’d had enough decorum to die on their throne when they couldn’t die on the field of battle. All that was missing was a sword through his chest or a goblet of poisoned wine in his hand.

The chains around Thor’s ankles, Skurge realized, meant Thor was most likely still alive. Hela wouldn’t bother to shackle a corpse.

Hela herself was seated on her brother’s lap, her slender form perched almost daintily on just one of his legs. Apparently she’d decided to incorporate her brother’s body into the furniture, treating him as just that much padding for her throne.

“Skurge,” she greeted imperiously. “My disgraced executioner. Do you know why I’ve called for you?”

Skurge figured he did. “To kill me,” he muttered, wishing he had sounded braver as he’d said it.

“Is that the only use I could possibly have for you?” Hela wondered. “How dull. Please, attempt to use your imagination. There must be _some_ thing I could do with you, other than finish you off.”

Skurge tried to think, but he knew it was futile. She was the Goddess of Death; in the short time Skurge had known her, she’d killed more than two hundred thousand people, nearly the whole population of Asgard.

“You could…” Skurge felt his heart pound, his hands starting to sweat. He looked down and noticed some smudges of blackened blood on the floor and a few bloody-black drag marks leading up the steps to the throne. His eyes widened. _I’m just a janitor._ Those had been the first words Skurge had spoken to her. “You could let me clean that up for you,” Skurge suggested, nodding towards the smudges. “I could mop the floors.”

“Mop the _floors?_ ” Hela repeated, loudly incredulous. “Do you think Death cares whether the floors are clean?”

Skurge swallowed and looked ashamed.

“Poor, unappreciated Skurge,” Hela smirked. “I must be the only one who sees your true potential.”

Skurge hated himself for the flicker of hope that he felt. He dared to raise his eyes, and Hela returned his tentative glance with a terrifying smile. She was running her fingers down her brother’s arm. “Tell me,” she commanded. “What do you think the worst part is, of being locked away for several thousand years?”

Hela picked Thor’s hand up with both of hers and turned it over, examining his palm, uncurling his fingers with the scrape of her nails. Skurge’s mouth felt dry, his tongue like cotton. “I don’t know,” he managed.

Hela frowned and formed her brother’s hand into a fist, turning it back over and then cradling it in her left hand, holding his fist closed. Then she reached her right arm over Thor’s and tucked his elbow against her hip. “Do you think it would be the boredom?” Hela suggested. “The lack of diversion? The loneliness?”

“Yeah, maybe could be that,” Skurge hurried to agree with her, his eyes fixated on Thor’s fist, which Hela now seemed to be… aiming… at Skurge’s face. Skurge was getting exponentially more concerned about his ignorance of the situation. Thor’s head lolled a bit as Hela snugged his elbow against her hip, but he showed no sign of waking.

“The worst part,” Hela declared. “Is the lack of an audience. No one to _see_ you. No one to appreciate your talent… no one to stare up at you in absolute terror.” She heaved a sigh. “All those years, I was deprived.”

Skurge couldn’t take the suspense. “Sorry, what are you doing with his arm?” he asked, sweating.

A sizzle of black light sparked across Thor’s knuckles. Hela smirked. “Torturing you,” she stated. She wrung a crackling branch of black energy out of her brother, down his arm and off the end of his fist like a blast from a cannon, striking Skurge in the chest.

Skurge cried out in pain and pitched forward, twitching from the searing sting of electricity. “You shot me,” he babbled, shocked in every sense of the word. “You _shot_ me!”

“Mmm,” Hela crooned in delight. “That works even better than I’d hoped.” She re-aimed Thor’s fist at Skurge, grinned, and blasted him again. She let the lightning flicker and writhe just a fraction of a second longer—just long enough to burn—and then laughed at the painful whining sounds Skurge made as he panted for breath.

“Yes,” she said. “You have great potential as an audience. An audience for your own demise. You will watch me as I administer your electrocution, bit by bit. Volt by volt. You will see me for what I am, and you will know that I am the one who owns your death—it is already mine. Others give their deaths to me, but _I_ will give _yours_ to you, when you have earned it through ample suffering.”

Somewhere in the middle of that spiel, and before she could fire a third bolt of lightning at Skurge, Thor started to wake up. 

“ _Nnh,_ ” Thor grunted, barely raising his head. He became aware of a weight on his leg—on his lap.

“ _What the—_ ” he exclaimed, jerking back as far as he could, which wasn’t far. She had him paralyzed again, his body under her control. “Hela—Get off me!”

Hela shook her head dismissively at his futile attempts to struggle, which mostly involved making strained faces. “But brother, you are ever so comfortable,” she said slyly. “Not much softer than the stone, perhaps, but so much more… alive. For now. It amuses me to feel the echo of your heartbeat, counting down its pulses to its final little pump.”

“Is that what you’re doing with my arm? Counting my pulse or something? Let go.” He tried with all his might to pull his arm away from her, but couldn’t move an inch. “Let me go,” he growled, lower.

“Not until we’re done,” she smirked.

“Done with what?” Thor demanded in reply.

Hela turned back to Skurge, her eyes gleaming with anticipation. “This,” she pronounced and pulled Thor’s power out of him, channeling it down his arm and jumping it off his knuckles, striking Skurge with a vein of lightning twice as thick as the previous two, snapping and cracking across his body. It lasted one second, _two_ , and then stopped, and Skurge’s pitiful whines of pain filled the room.

Thor was speechless. It had felt similar to the way it had when she’d siphoned some of his energy away to heal herself earlier, but now on a much greater scale. It never felt that draining when Thor called his lightning for himself; when he rallied it from under his skin or from deep in his core, from his soul, it came naturally, willingly. Now, it was being forced out. Extracted. 

“What is this?” Thor asked his sister, his voice low.

“Shall I show you again?” she countered brightly.

“No. Don’t,” Thor said, but Hela ignored him, firing another black bolt of lightning from Thor’s clenched hand into her shuddering victim.

Skurge cried out again, and this time when the lightning stopped, he began to beg. “No more,” he panted. “Please… no more.”

Thor felt a chill in his heart, an ache like a broken bone. Skurge was in chains, a noncombatant. What Hela had just used him for—deliberate infliction of pain, continuing after the opponent was subdued—Thor would never do this, never.

Looking pleased, Hela set Thor’s arm down, so her hands were free. She shifted around, facing Thor, sitting sideways across his lap. “Does it bother you?” she asked merrily, peering into his solitary eye. “His pain - you don’t like it, do you?” She stroked one hand down Thor’s cheek. “I can tell that you don’t. And that’s all right, you don’t need to like it. I don’t especially enjoy pain myself, though it’s an important appetizer for the main course. Pain and Death have… an association. A painless death is like a fruit that falls on a gust of wind—a poetic, perhaps even a lovely event, but unsatisfying. I find the fruit tastes better when you have to seize it by the stem and _tear it from the tree._ ”

She paused, noting his disgust, and her eyes twinkled as though she’d just been told a highly entertaining secret. “It’s not just suffering you dislike,” she said warmly. “It’s _me_ , isn’t it? You don’t like _me._ ”

Thor blinked at her, incredulous. “You slaughtered my people,” he reminded her. “You killed my friends. And you’re using me to torture someone.”

Hela hummed a chuckle. “Yes. Aren’t I magnificent?”

“You’re awful,” Thor told her. “You need to stop all this and go back to Hel. There must be billions of people dying every day all through the universe—isn’t that enough to satisfy you?”

Her smug expression twisted into a sneer. “There are thunderstorms right now on a million worlds you’ve never heard of, does that do anything for _you?_ ”

“No, it’s a naturally occurring phenomenon,” Thor protested. “I’m not personally manifesting every single lightning bolt all the time.”

“Exactly. And I’m not personally orchestrating every death. If the people dying don’t recognize me, if they’ve never even heard of me, their deaths are no triumph of mine. I may tally up the heaps of their souls in Hel, but I derive very little benefit from them if they don’t even know who I am. That is why it’s essential for me to be here, on Asgard, for the creation of my army.”

She stood, and then reached back towards her brother’s neck. Thor half expected her to strangle him, but instead she curled her fingers over the top edge of his armor, and pulled him off the throne. His knees hit the top step of the dais and his arms fell limply to his sides, until Hela narrowed her eyes at him and willed him to stand. “Follow me, brother,” she commanded. “You’ve reminded me that we have some work to do.”

As Hela led him out, Thor looked down at Skurge, who was still huddled into a pathetic ball. Their eyes met in mutual shame.

***

Hela strode through her spacious palace, her subservient brother in tow. What a brilliant move, on Odin’s part, to shunt so much power into his son—it was literally all there for the taking, for _her_ taking, as Odin’s natural heir. True, it had happened against Thor’s will, but it had been _so easy._

She brought Thor to the vault, to Odin’s treasure house, which she herself had already desecrated. If Thor’s eye lingered on the Tesseract for a moment, she didn’t notice. She scooped one hand into the Eternal Flame, breathing deeply as she gathered another dose of the eldritch energy into herself. Thor shivered as an echo of that sensation passed from his sister’s body to his. “Help me carry this,” Hela murmured and thrust his hand into the flames.

Thor had never dreamed of touching any of the relics kept in here, but the Eternal Flame had always been especially off-limits. Now Thor could practically feel Surtur’s crown rattling in agitation across the room as the power of the flame surged into him, topping off whatever reservoir Hela had been draining. He felt bigger, stronger—as though red-hot magma was surging just under his skin.

It occurred to Thor then that storing the Crown of Surtur in the same hall as the Eternal Flame had not been the safest idea. One good earthquake and Surtur himself might have risen to end the world. Not that there was much world left to end, now that ninety-nine percent of the people had already been massacred. In a swell of despair, Thor wondered what harm could be done by resurrecting Surtur on purpose and letting him destroy the planet after all.

A sudden thought made Thor slide a glance at the crown. What harm…or what _good?_ If Asgard were destroyed… would Hela be stopped?

“Come, brother,” Hela snapped, jerking his attention away from the foreboding crown. “We must replenish our ranks.”

She took him by the hand and dragged him down to the bottommost layer of crypts he hadn’t even known existed, cavernous ossuaries where endless rows of fossilized warriors lay in repose, still recognizable as Einherjar by their helms. Thor was horrified to learn that the palace - and the entire city around it - had been built atop a thousand-tiered necropolis.

Hela breathed the sacred air of the tombs, reveling in her memories. She could almost taste the splendor of those days, when Odin had been young and ravenous for power, for dominance. Mjolnir had been her companion, her tool—they had crushed cities, empires, dynasties. Together they had been unstoppable. Odin and Hela had conquered whole worlds...and nearly lost their own.

Hela had been there the day that Asgard had ceased to be a regular planet. A secret alliance between the Fire Demons and the Dark Elves had nearly succeeded in ending Asgard forever. Only a scrap of the planet remained in the aftermath, magically preserved in violation of the laws of physics. The prophecies about Ragnarok had been made that day.

“These are the warriors I need,” Hela narrated, stalking through the crypts, hand-in-hand with her brother. “The ones who knew me, who served under my command. There are other armies in Hel, but they aren’t as loyal, aren’t as strong. These warriors—fallen in the battles of our founding, Odin swept them up and kept them here, kept them away from me. But now they are mine and shall serve me again, to new and incalculable glory.”

Thor watched in astonishment as ancient skeletons jerked and jittered, rising into an eerie state of reanimation all around him. With Hela holding his hand, Thor himself became the conduit for the Eternal Flame and felt the work of magic he could never have managed (and would never have attempted) on his own. He was sorely out of his element, feverish and weakening, and wished that Loki were there to explain what was happening to him. Even if Thor wouldn’t understand the explanation, it would still be comforting to know that Loki understood it.

“Here’s how it will end,” Hela predicted. “Once these sacred halls are empty, we’ll have millions of Draugrs standing at arms. The Jotuns will come and be destroyed, and then I’ll have _you_ kill our little brother. That should be a nice, memorable moment for you. I mean he’s just sort of _asking for it,_ isn’t he?” She interlaced her fingers with Thor’s, and a greenish light glowed from between their palms. “I can’t wait to see you make him twitch.”

Thor felt ill, remembering how he’d left Loki on Sakaar.

“What’s with this guilty face?” Hela asked, quickly picking up on Thor’s expression. “Perhaps our brother has already experienced your talents? It must have been tempting to try out your abilities on such a convenient subject—and as a punishment, such extraordinary pain must have been irresistible to inflict.”

The queasy feelings worsened, hot and seeping, sticky in his throat. It was true that Thor had zapped Loki with lightning countless times, but it had usually been by accident. Those few times that Thor had called lightning down on his brother in anger, it had been more about Thor expressing his emotions, rather than a calculated move to cause pain.

But Thor _had_ made a calculated move of that sort against Loki once—with the obedience disk, on Sakaar. And Thor had been pleased with himself for pulling that off, had closed his heart to Loki’s suffering in that moment, relishing the upper hand. He’d been horrified by Hela using him to torture Skurge. But he had deliberately inflicted an excruciating punishment on Loki—and smiled while he did it.

The darkness of that now felt like Hela, felt like _Odin,_ the way Odin must have been before Thor was born. Manipulative, vindictive— a torturer? Thor didn’t want to believe he was cut from that same cloth, but couldn’t deny there was a scrap of it lining his pockets.

He turned his head and retched, coughing watery bile onto the stones at his feet. Hela assisted him down to his knees and let him brace his free hand on the ground as his body tried, violently but in vain, to expel the poison of the task he was helping her with.

“Poor little godling,” Hela murmured. “It seems Death magic doesn’t agree with you, though that’s hardly surprising. Raising the dead this way is a corruption of your fundamental energy.” Idly she revisited the idea that she’d captured the wrong brother. She had no doubt that Loki would’ve been able to stomach this business, innately foul as it was. The defiance of nature was a taste that a Jotun sorcerer raised as an Asgardian prince must have acquired.

“How much longer?” Thor groaned, his stomach clenching painfully.

“Only a few more million to go,” Hela answered airily. “Don’t worry, you’ll be exhausted but not extinguished. I’ll tuck you right into bed when we’re done.” Thor’s head sagged and she petted his hair, watching hungrily as the greenish glow spread upwards and outwards through the crypts, racing like fire across dried grass.

***

Later, when their work was done, Hela settled Thor’s shivering body back onto their father’s bed. Once again she cast a black miasma over him and pinned him in place with criss-crossed blades.

“You did well,” she murmured, stroking his hair. “I could have done it all on my own, of course, but it was so much more enjoyable to have you beside me. You are an excellent assistant.” She bent down to kiss his brow, but he turned his face away. She hesitated for barely a second before pulling back, amused by his tiny act of defiance.

She left him alone to heal.

Thor drifted in a haze of fever dreams, the skull of Surtur lurking in his mind, promising an answer, an end to everything. He found himself praying that Loki would reach out and join his thoughts again, telling him what to do. Ending the world was not a decision he wanted to make by himself.

Suddenly Loki was there, standing beside him.

 _Is this a dream, or are you really here?_ Thor wondered gauzily.

“I’m really here, in your dream,” Loki replied.

Thor wasn’t sure what to make of that, and Loki detected his need for reassurance. “We’ll both remember this conversation when you wake up,” Loki clarified. “Does that answer your question?”

 _Ok then, real enough,_ Thor thought back into his brother’s mind. _I’m glad you’re back._

Loki ignored the emotion Thor’s response evoked in him. “What happened since I last checked in?” he asked, studying his brother in concern.

_She used me—and the Eternal Flame—to reanimate more soldiers for her. Did you know our whole city is built atop a mausoleum?_

Loki nodded solemnly. “Yes. Odin only started sailing the dead off the edge of the world on burning ships when he ran out of room in the crypts below.”

 _There’s plenty of room there now,_ Thor thought bitterly. _We emptied out every last bier. She has over five million Draugrs standing at arms, Loki… I don’t think your Jotuns can win._

Loki didn’t feel like they were “his” Jotuns but decided to let it slide. “Perhaps not in a classic pitched battle,” he conceded. “But I have no intention of fighting fair. I have the Casket of Ancient Winters and the correct bloodline to wield it, so,”

 _You thinking freezing her will stop her?_ Thor interrupted, and Loki hesitated, considering how best to share his plans.

“Freezing the Draugrs will stop them, but not destroy them completely,” he admitted. “I had thought to lure her armies to Jotunheim, lead them into the great chasm caused by the Bifrost, and then flood the whole canyon with power from the Casket, sealing them under miles of ice.”

Thor was impressed. _That sounds terrific,_ he thought. _Why not just go with that?_

Loki narrowed his eyes, frowning. “Really? And leave five million undead warriors paused mid-stride, waiting for a thaw? Any number of things might happen in the future to unleash them. Freezing her army would be a temporary solution at best. The casket will be better used for freezing a few other things instead.”

Like what? Thor wondered innocently.

“Like _Hel,_ for starters,” Loki said.

There was a beat. _Ah, Loki,_ Thor thought fondly. _I should’ve expected nothing less._

The warmth of Thor's tone burned into Loki’s heart. “And you,” he blurted out. “I may have to freeze you too.”

 _Oh._ Thor thought awkwardly. _Temporarily, I hope._

“The thing is, Thor…” Loki took a breath, steadied himself. “I know how to trap her. I know what Odin did to imprison her and I know I can copy it. And I think if I’m fast enough, I can freeze any of her potential victims before she has a chance kill them. The theory is that someone frozen into stasis would be unkillable and therefore of no use to her.” 

Thor thought through that. _But don’t forget what she did to Mjolnir,_ Thor cautioned. _No matter how solid you freeze a person she could probably still shatter them to bits._

“Good point,” Loki acknowledged. “And I’d rather not have to freeze whole planets if I can help it. I want to imprison her at the earliest opportunity. But first I need to undo whatever she did to you, and I’m not sure how. Can you remember any details about what she did? I hate to ask, but did she cut out your heart?”

_Uhh, she stabbed me in the heart, but didn’t remove it from my body. As far as I know._

“That’s a good thing,” Loki assured him. “Did she invoke anything elemental? Water, fire? Anything like that?”

 _Um, it sort of seemed like she kissed me,_ Thor remembered.

Loki blinked at him. “That information is incredibly unhelpful,” he deemed, voice flat. “Can you remember anything else?”

Thor’s memories flickered restlessly. _It’s kind of a blur. She stabbed me in the heart, waved some smoky symbols in the air…I think it was her name. Oh, she asked me if I wanted to live, and I said yes._

“Hmm,” Loki’s frown deepened. “It seems too simple. But at the moment I’m really not sure how to separate the two of you.”

Thor remembered that odd flash of fear he’d felt, the dread of being locked away with Hela for eternity. Had that been a premonition? _I thought you said she claimed me_ , Thor recalled. _Can’t you... revoke her claim?_

“Think of it like this,” Loki explained. “Your power, imagine it like an object, like a spear or a book — or like Mjolnir. It was yours, but Hela had the right to claim it, so now it’s hers.”

 _Can’t you just go and take it away from her?_ Thor wondered. _And then give it back to me?_

“Ha,” Loki smiled, flattered that Thor thought it might be that easy for Loki to overpower their sister. “I’m afraid it’s a birthright issue. It’s the same rules as her claim to the throne. Unless there are any other, even _older_ secret siblings of ours waiting in the wings—”

 _Probably can’t rule that out, honestly,_ Thor grumbled.

“—Then only Odin has the right to take from Hela what Hela took from you,” Loki finished, and then cocked his head. “Or, I suppose technically Odin’s elder brother would have a valid claim as well.”

A sad cloud billowed over Thor’s thoughts. _But Odin and Uncle Tyr are both dead._

“And I can’t bring either of them back to life, so don’t ask,” Loki mentioned. “If I could go back in time and somehow manage to be born ahead of you, and then also manage to make my adoption legitimate rather than a glorified abduction, then I suppose I’d have the right to make the claim in question. But a younger sibling can’t cut the line unless the elder one abdicates, and even then, the elder one always has the option to reassert themselves in the hierarchy.”

Thor knew all this, though it was annoying to think that birth order had so much sway over who had what right. On Midgard such systems were mostly extinct; Thor himself felt no great conviction that his own future offspring should be entitled to inherit his power. Maybe it was time to tear down all that ancient monarchical nonsense. _That reminds me,_ Thor thought. _What about Ragnarok?_

Loki paused. “The prophesied end of the world,” he recapped tersely. “What of it?”

_Surtur’s crown and the Eternal Flame are practically right next to each other. So I was thinking… maybe it’s time._

Loki’s heart twisted a little. “You’d destroy our home?”

_I’ve been down to the foundations of it now and I’ve seen with my own eyes--_

“Eye,” Loki corrected gently.

 _I’ve seen that it’s rotten and hollow,_ Thor thought with grim determination. _Valkyrie called this place a golden sham and she was right. So maybe it’s time to tear it all down. It should have been blown up millennia ago anyway—the only thing holding it together all these years has been stolen magic and—_ his heart hitched. _And pride. We thought we were a beacon of hope, but it turns out we were just greedy and cruel._

“Ragnarok would certainly destroy Hela’s Draugrs,” Loki reasoned. “Better than freezing them at the bottom of a canyon on Jotunheim, at least.”

Resolve gathered in Thor’s soul like a wave, determination welling up around him. _So that’s the plan,_ Thor decided. _Ragnarok._

Loki went still, soaking in the significance of that word. There was something sad about Thor being the one to make this choice. “Just don’t do it without me,” Loki cautioned. “And certainly not until I know for sure that I can pull you out in time.”

Thor’s thoughts were quiet for a moment, held back from his brother’s ability to sense them. _Thank you,_ Thor projected towards Loki at last. _I’m glad I don’t have to do this alone._

“I’ll be with you,” Loki promised. “We’ll do it together. Just wait for me.”

On the other side of Loki’s consciousness, something beeped—the intercom on the Statesman. “I have to go,” Loki told his brother, casting a critical final glance over Thor’s situation. “Heal up, try not to let Hela drain too much more of your energy and please make an effort to earn her trust. Everything will be much easier if you can persuade her to let you have control over your own limbs, at least.”

 _Earn her trust?_ Thor thought back, incredulous. _How am I supposed to do that?_

“She’s an open book, Thor, it’ll be the easiest thing in the world,” Loki insisted, annoyed that his brother hadn’t already settled on this course of action on his own. “She’s desperate for adulation. She wants a follower, an acolyte. Just give her what she wants, in exchange for a little looser rein.”

Thor recoiled at that idea from the very core of his being, but he had to admit, being walked around like a puppet with no control of his own strings was getting old. _Fine, I’ll see what I can do. But she might not buy it,_ he thought grumpily.

Loki sent his brother an expression that was half sympathy and half smirk. “I think you underestimate yourself,” he said wryly. “She’s been alone for thousands of years. Express the merest interest, the slightest admiration in her direction and she’ll be eating out of your hand in no time.”

 _Ugh, gross,_ Thor groaned, but he sensed Loki’s rising aggravation and decided not to whine too much. _You’d be much better at this than me,_ Thor thought begrudgingly.

“Better at sliding my way into the good graces of a powerful evil being who’s taken me prisoner?” Loki parsed, accepting the backhanded compliment with ease. “You’re right. I’m better at that than anyone. And now I really do have to go—I’ve got to face a whole planet of people whose opinion of me is, rightfully, even lower than yours.”

 _Loki, wait,_ Thor tried to call out, distressed that he’d managed to let another conversation with his brother go sideways so fast. But Loki was gone from his mind.

***

Bruce was on the bridge with Heimdall when the planet first came into view. Jotunheim. A blue-white ball of ice illuminated in the eerie glow of an all-too-distant star.

“…You’re sure anything lives there?” Bruce asked in disbelief, as the computer started to register the conditions on the planet’s surface. Heimdall nodded solemnly.

The image on the screen zoomed in to show a dramatic fissure in the planet’s crust, a trench that traveled in a straight line for what must have been hundreds of miles. At a glance it looked like someone had tried to cut the planet in half with a giant laser, but had given up halfway through.

“What’s that weird stripe?” Bruce wondered.

“That is the scar left by the Bifrost,” Heimdall informed him.

The image on the screen was still zooming in, revealing the astonishing depth of the chasm. Bruce thought of the Mariana Trench on Earth—deeper than Everest was tall. “The Bifrost did that?” he asked, aghast. “The same Bifrost you sometimes point at Earth?”

Heimdall did not smile. “The Bifrost was originally conceived as a weapon,” he said neutrally. “When such a weapon was no longer needed, Odin adapted it for interplanetary transport. I was entrusted with the key to its operation, sworn to guard the realms from the Bifrost’s misuse. The scar you see on Jotunheim is the result of the one time I failed in my duties.”

Bruce’s eyebrows went high, his mouth falling open. “You mean somebody got past you, even though you can literally see everything? Who could have—”

“Ahem,” Loki cleared his throat behind them. Hulk startled a bit in the back of Bruce’s mind, reflexively angry that someone had snuck up on him. “Admiring my work?”

Wide-eyed, Bruce turned to face Loki and pointed emphatically at the devastating gash across the planet’s surface. “You did that?”

Loki narrowed his eyes. “I _did_ tell you I once tried to destroy the planet.” He looked up and studied the chasm. “It was wrong of me,” he added. “I wish I hadn’t.”

He sounded so plainly sincere that Bruce, who was not usually a hugger, had to overcome an urge to hug him.

“They are expecting us on the surface,” Heimdall rumbled. “Will you hail them?”

Loki nodded. Bruce figured he would use the ship’s communication equipment, but Loki waved a scrying mirror into the air instead. The silvery swirl resolved into the image of a vast courtyard inside a cavernous partially collapsed hall. There were drifts of snow against toppled columns and a central pile of rubble that might have once been a throne. The whole scene was draped in dark slate-gray shadows, and Bruce would have believed that the place had been deserted for centuries—until some of the shadows moved.

“Citizens of Jotunheim,” Loki said clearly, and a few more shadows shifted, attending to his words. “I am Loki—”

“Son of Laufey,” interjected the largest shadow, moving closer until Bruce could see it was a somber-faced man with dark, dusky-blue skin. “We know who you are. And what you’ve done.”

“I suspected as much,” Loki smiled, not missing a beat. “But I don’t think you know what I’m going to do next.”

There was a frigid silence from the mirror. “We are uninterested in your tricks,” the Jotun answered at length in a beleaguered voice. “If Heimdall had not convinced us of your peoples’ dire need, we would ask you to leave us in peace.”

“I will leave you in something better than peace,” Loki promised swiftly. “I’ll leave you in power. What Odin stole from you, I will return.”

The only sound from the mirror was a ghostly howl of wind blowing a flurry of snow into the hall. Bruce now counted at least two dozen of the grim, blue-gray Frost Giants standing around, focusing on the mirror in unanimous silence.

Loki narrowed his eyes at the silent Jotuns. “You know I can _hear you_ , when you all join minds like that,” he said in disapproval.

“As is your inborn right,” uttered the shadowy spokesman. “It is true that you were abducted from us. But our consensus stands. You are more Aesir than Jotun, and we do not want you.”

“I wasn’t talking about me,” Loki insisted, annoyed. He materialized the Casket of Ancient Winters in front of him, gripping it with both hands. “I meant _this_.”

The Jotuns fell silent once more, communicating telepathically amongst themselves, and Loki seemed to be fighting back a smile at the corner of his lips. Bruce hoped that didn’t signify that Loki had an ace (or a shiv) up his sleeve (though he probably had both); the Jotuns seemed non-hostile so far and Bruce hoped they’d stay that way.

“The Casket is also yours by right,” the spokesman pronounced at length in a resentful tone. “None of us have the strength to wield it or to resist its use. So we are at your mercy.”

Loki’s face twitched. “It isn’t mercy,” he corrected. “It’s restitution. I’m not trying to rule over you. I’m trying—” he reeled himself in and continued in a lower, steadier voice. “I’m trying to save my brother, who is the true king of Asgard. I’m trying to save this one ship of refugees, who are the only survivors of Hela’s butchery. And I’m trying to save the rest of the universe from the Goddess of Death. You are the last people I would come to, but I have no other choice. We stand on the hinge of something larger than my pride. Larger than my shame. So here I am, asking. Will you accept this power?”

There was another prolonged silence. Loki grew visibly impatient, adjusting his grip on the ominously glowing chest like he might be about to chuck it at the mirror and be done with it. He’d been holding onto it long enough for its energy to begin to flow into him, calling forth the truth of his Jotun blood and threatening to change his outward appearance against his will. It was requiring more and more effort to remain in his Asgardian skin.

“We will receive you at the Temple of Tombs,” said the spokesman at last.

“How appropriate,” Loki muttered, with what was almost a sneer. “We’ll land within the hour.” He turned his back to the mirror as it dissolved and sent the casket away with an irritated shake of his hands. Then he stalked to a seat next to Bruce and slouched into it, one foot tapping restlessly against the floor.

“So… are you okay?” Bruce wondered after a minute. Heimdall was gazing past them both at the rapidly approaching surface of the planet and offered no clues to the possible ramifications of Loki’s dissatisfaction.

Loki cast an icy glance in Bruce’s direction. “I still hate them,” he said simply. “The Jotuns. They’re tedious and sullen and I hate them. I don’t particularly wish them ill, I don’t want to control them, and I certainly don’t want to kill them all, anymore--”

“That’s, okay, good,” Bruce said, struggling to process Loki’s confession. “Killing them all would definitely be bad.”

“But I don’t feel like one of them,” Loki continued. “I can barely stand the sight of them.”

“It will take time,” Heimdall advised kindly. “Beliefs may be learned, but they may also be chosen.”

“I still don’t like _you_ much either,” Loki muttered to Heimdall, and Heimdall smiled in reply, not the least bit offended.

***

The Statesman descended through the atmosphere, weary engines whining as they battled the icy winds. The Temple of Tombs was positioned on a cliff overlooking a frozen sea. Twenty-foot waves had been frozen in place, stretching back miles from the shore, looking as though they might resume rolling at any moment. A vast semi-circular plain spread out on the land around the temple like the train of a wedding dress, dotted with tens of thousands of snow-covered burial mounds.

By the time the ship landed, a sizable crowd of the locals had gathered to witness their arrival. Bruce estimated the Jotuns standing expectantly on the temple grounds outnumbered the remaining Asgardians at least ten to one. They were all as shadowy and grim as the ones Loki had contacted from the bridge, their skin the blue of stone and rain clouds standing out in glum contrast to the woolly heaps of snow.

The Statesman touched down, and all the refugees clustered anxiously by the gangplank doors, eager to be let out under the snowy sky. The air might be frigid on Jotunheim, but at least it was fresh. Bruce found himself in the middle of the hustle and bustle, right where he never wanted to be. Just as soon as he started to look around for someone familiar to stand beside, Loki appeared.

He was carrying the casket like before, only now it seemed brighter, its light more white than blue. He’d also changed his outfit and was now clothed head to toe in black, with a black fur cloak wrapped imposingly around his shoulders. And he was wearing his curved-horned helm, the sight of which alarmed Bruce enough to make Hulk tense in the back of his mind.

Loki gave Bruce a sympathetic look which was utterly incongruous with his costume. He looked like a wintery warlord-warlock-Viking who would be most at home leading some sort of horde, probably of orcs. “By your measure of temperature it’s about two hundred out there,” Loki mentioned. “Would you like a cloak?”

Bruce frowned, puzzled. “Think we’ve finally hit a translation error.” He shook his head. “Two hundred degrees doesn’t make sense.”

Loki blinked. “Kelvin,” he specified. “Isn’t that what physicists use?” 

Bruce’s brain jolted in surprise. “That’s negative ninety-nine, Fahrenheit,” he exclaimed, already feeling a chill at the thought. “And I’m afraid at a hundred below, a cloak’s not gonna cut it,” he said. “I’ll just stay in the ship.”

“Oh,” said Loki awkwardly. “I was hoping you’d come with me. For protection. I know they have every right to want me dead, but I certainly can’t let them kill me off until Thor is safe.”

“Protection?” Bruce echoed, incredulous. “Are you crazy? We didn’t talk about this.” He tried to tell himself it wouldn’t be happening, but it was almost too late—he sensed that Hulk was interested. “The other guy may not even understand what’s going on,” Bruce protested. “He might freak out and smash all the Frost Giants just for standing around and creeping him out!”

 _Hulk won’t,_ Hulk thought grumpily, in the clearest thought Bruce had sensed from him in a while.

“He might even smash _you!_ ” Bruce warned Loki in desperation. “Just because _I’ve_ been spending time with you doesn’t automatically mean that Hulk will be your friend.”

 _Let Hulk out!_ Hulk half-yelled in Bruce’s mind, and Bruce started looking for an exit. There were too many people in here, waiting for the doors to open.

“Ah—Everyone, stand back please,” Loki announced, seeing the wild look on Bruce’s face. The Asgardians cleared a space, and the doors to the outside began to open, instantly letting in a flash of cold and a flutter of snow. The icy air hit Bruce like a slap. He was stunned enough that his control slipped. The Hulk leapt at his chance to emerge, squashing Bruce’s consciousness into oblivion.

The doors opened the rest of the way, and Loki stepped out into the wind, carrying the casket. Hulk stepped out behind him, looking right and left at the assembled crowd. The Frost Giants stared back at him with their dark red eyes, unsmiling but also unthreatening. Most of them were just as tall as Hulk, but Hulk knew he could beat them all in a flight. Loki was a head shorter than the shortest of the Jotuns, though his long-horned helmet and rugged fur cloak made him an imposing figure nonetheless.

Loki paused at the bottom of the gangplank and announced again that he was going to return the casket to its rightful place. Standing in the doorway to the ship, Heimdall nodded in approval. Nobody said a word, but the crowd parted, clearing a path to the temple. They all watched as Loki began the trek.

Hulk followed just a few steps behind, aware that Loki wanted Hulk to protect him, but also determined to smash Loki into paste if Loki turned evil. The wind gusted and the snow flurries intensified. Hulk’s skin prickled. He was too strong to be damaged by cold, but he could still feel it. It was a good thing that Banner was gone, Hulk reasoned, because this place was too cold for him, and he would probably be afraid of the blue ice-people anyway.

The casket, meanwhile, felt like it was getting heavier, harder to carry with every step. Loki knew where this was going and knew it would be easier just to let the casket take effect—but on the other hand he never liked giving up when he should and almost always took things too far, and even if he was quitting most of his other bad habits he really couldn’t stop being contrary altogether. _I’m not what you say I am_ was practically his motto. So, when the casket began to insist that he ought to transform into a Jotun, Loki proceeded to insist that he ought _not._ When his fingertips turned blue, he fought it, and when the dreadful color began to creep up his arms he fought harder, and even though he was halfway blue by the time he reached the temple steps he was still determined to resist.

As the task became more difficult, Loki’s resolve only increased. The cumbersome relic was just going to have to cooperate.

“Box heavy?” Hulk asked eventually, as Loki’s progress up the stairs slowed.

“Extremely,” Loki confirmed, panting for breath. If the Hulk noticed that his hands were blue, he didn’t comment.

“Hulk help?” Hulk asked next.

Loki paused and considered the unexpected offer, looking up at Hulk with eyes that were still cyan, even as he felt the transformation creeping past his collarbones, closing in on his face. “Thank you,” Loki said over the wind. “But I’m almost there. And I want to do this myself.” He studied the rest of the distance to his destination, which was a rectangular stone altar at the top of the steps. He wasn’t going to make it, not in his Aesir form. Any second now the casket would transform him, against his every effort to resist. It would be one more fight he’d lose.

 _So be it._ He straightened his shoulders and took another step, another breath with Asgardian lungs—and felt the change complete itself, turning him into the thing he didn’t want to be. The power within the casket began to pulse like a living heart, strengthening in intensity, and the relic grew as light in Loki’s hands as Mjolnir had always seemed in Thor’s.

At the top of the steps the casket began to pull Loki towards the altar, towards the exact place where Odin had foiled Laufey’s attempted sacrifice, by rescuing the child whose birthright had been to die. The child whose sacrificed soul would have powered a new weapon, as a replacement for the relic Odin had stolen. 

_It’s over now,_ Loki thought bitterly, thinking of both of his fathers and their pointless war, of which Loki had always been a prisoner. _Here’s the power you both wanted. It’s back where it belongs._

He set the casket down on the altar. Instantly a white light shot out across the frozen sea in a beam, while a blast of the infinite icy wind rushed down the temple steps and across the fields beyond, stripping the burial mounds of their blankets of snow. The Statesman creaked and shuddered as the wind raced past it, all the refugees huddling together in dread.

On the gangplank, Heimdall never took his eyes from the temple. The wind reached blizzard strength, the frenzied snow shrieking like a chorus of demons—and then all was calm. The beam of light still blazed out across the sea, reminiscent of the Bifrost. The assembled Jotuns hadn’t moved an inch, even in the worst of the gale, and stood motionless, facing the temple. 

Loki released the casket and turned around, surveying the crowd with ruby eyes.

As one, the Jotuns dropped to their knees, the action so uniform it made a resounding _thud._ Their thoughts united, and Loki heard them all, recognizing him as the King of Jotunheim, the King of the Frost Giants, and the herald of the New Era. 

Loki’s first emotion at witnessing a field of thousands kneeling before him was a flash of annoyance, accompanied by a sharp thought of _I don’t want this._ There had been a time when he’d convinced himself that this was what he was owed. That conviction had helped him survive. But he’d never wanted the throne, even when he’d taken it. 

_This is what Hela wants,_ Loki realized. And then he had to laugh, because he’d never wondered before whether or not he might be the god of irony--but maybe he was. Here he was, receiving everything that Hela so desperately desired, while Hela possessed the power of Thor, and all the rest of Thor, too. 

“What funny?” Hulk asked, perturbed. 

“I’ve thought of how to do it,” Loki said brightly. “How to separate Thor from Hela.” 

_Think of your power like an object,_ Loki had said earlier. _Like a spear or a book…_ or a casket. He had no legitimate claim to the power of Thor. He couldn’t copy what Hela had done. But he _could_ copy Odin. And when Odin had wanted something he had no right to take…

Odin had been a thief. Loki was a better one.


	6. When Hel Freezes Over

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I assumed he would come to me, you know, because I have something he wants. But if our brother prefers to wage war in Hel,” she smirked. “I shall oblige.”

The hours passed slowly for Thor, his bones aching as he recovered from Hela’s depletion of his power. If this was the Odinsleep, it was a disappointment—it was far too close to consciousness. Thor preferred not to think while he was asleep.

By the time Hela came to collect him, Thor was committed to following Loki's suggestion: he would attempt to earn her trust. He started with something small, asking for water. She smirked and stalked towards him with a cup in her hand as though she were cornering an injured bird with a net. 

Thor tried to sit up but was still pinned in place on the bed. Hela hovered the cup over his face, and he thought that she might pour the water over him, to laugh while he sputtered. He was at her mercy. The vicious glint in her eyes told him that she expected him to struggle, so he forced himself to stay calm, looking hopefully from her eyes to the cup and back.

Hela began to slowly tilt the cup forward, waiting for a flicker of rage or despair, some break in the façade of her seemingly-compliant prisoner. But all he did was gaze innocently up at her, trying to lift his head. After a moment she allowed him to raise his head a few inches and brought the cup to his lips.

He held eye contact with her as he drank it all down, as readily as if he’d never wanted to hold a glass for himself in his life. 

“Thank you,” Thor said when the water was gone. He settled his head back down, so calm he almost looked comfortable.

Hela scowled, slightly bemused, like she wouldn’t have expected him to thank her for water even if he’d been on fire.

Thor thought that was a pretty good start.

From then on, he made Hela the center of his attention. Yesterday he had preferred to glower at the floor or whatever corner of the room was furthest away from his sister; today, his eye rarely strayed from her face.

Most people would have felt intimidated, having Thor watching them that closely—but he was careful to seem more like a pet looking at its master and less like a predator studying its prey. He kept his head lower than hers whenever possible, so he could look up at her with his chin raised and his face free of shadows, and he kept his shoulders slumped slightly inwards, which at least made him look humble and eager to please even if it couldn’t quite make him look small.

She noticed the difference in his attitude immediately and basked in it, preening and flaunting in the presence of a devoted audience. Apparently, one of the activities on her agenda for the day (whilst waiting for the cowardly Jotuns to attempt their sure-to-fail invasion) was to review a parade of her millions of newly-roused troops, who were to shuffle past her throne for hours on end, groaning and gurgling some scripted words of allegiance as they went.

Hela assumed her seat and bade her brother kneel beside her, chained as he’d been the day before, keeping his head within petting distance. Once Thor was in place, Hela banged Gungnir against the floor and commanded in a voice that resounded through the hall like a cannon-boom: “ _March._ ”

The Draugrs marched. They moved like an army of puppets, unnaturally stiff and dragging in some places; jerkily over-accelerated in others. To Asgardian sensibilities, it was horrific. These were soldiers without free will, unable to fight with honor. They were worse than slaves, worse than machines.

Hela presided over the macabre affair, humming in pleasure whenever a particular group was able to proclaim loyalty in anything more intelligible than a death-rattle hiss.

The whole exhibition offended Thor to the roots of his soul. He would have gladly resurrected Surtur then and there just to put a stop to it. He couldn’t handle witnessing these endless columns of undead soldiers marching for his sister’s amusement—his disgust would have certainly been plain on his face. He carefully turned his head so his eyepatch faced the ghoulish parade and focused on Hela instead. _Look respectful,_ he commanded himself. _Look dutiful. Look impressed. Earn her trust._

Eventually, his commitment paid off. “…It seems that you finally _see_ me,” Hela commented at last, as the Draugrs continued to stagger and lurch through the throne room. 

“Yes, sister,” Thor answered solemnly.

“I do like being _beheld,_ ” she stated, unabashed. She waved dismissively at the latest group of drones swearing their loyalty and turned her full attention to her brother. “And by such a lovely eye—it’s a shame I had to slash out its twin.”

“I deserved it,” Thor said. “I’m sorry I made you do it.”

“Hmm,” Hela smirked. “When I left you last night you were still quite rebellious. What changed?”

“Forgive me,” Thor said. “I was ill and…overwhelmed.”

Hela made a stirring motion with Gungnir in her hand in the corner of his vision, tempting Thor to be distracted by the motion, but his focus stayed locked on her face. “Overwhelmed?” she wondered, vaguely mocking. “Care to elaborate?”

Thor took a careful breath, hoping he could sell this. “What we did yesterday, raising our army, I’d never imagined anything like that,” he said, voice low. “I always loved the stories of the ancient wars, all the famous victories. But I thought those days were long past. Now I think I see…” he looked back and forth between her eyes, and then dared to glance out at the marching Draugrs.

“The future?” she guessed smugly.

“My future,” Thor affirmed. “Here, at your side. I’ll have my chance to serve as great a conqueror as Odin ever was.”

“Greater,” Hela predicted, her eyes gleaming with conviction.

Thor looked at her like he longed to believe her, like she was the promise of dawn. “Greater,” he echoed.

Hela’s eyes were bright. “Bold of you,” she deemed. “To think you could so easily earn my trust.”

Thor felt a quiver of warning, a pang that told him the jig was up. He decided to take a risk. “How can I earn it, then?” he asked solemnly. “Tell me what to do.”

“Yes, I shall,” she smiled and banged Gungnir against the floor again, halting all the Draugrs in their tracks. “Disperse,” she commanded the soldiers, standing up. “Back to your posts. Go.”

The soulless creatures retreated immediately, shuffling wordlessly away. Once they were alone in the room Hela slouched back in her throne, resting her cheek against her fist and waiting for her brother to tip his hand.

He gazed up at her, earnestly awaiting her command. He'd always struggled with his father's lessons about a warrior's patience, but in this case he knew better than to rush ahead. 

“…I imagine most of the people you’ve met over the centuries have trusted you easily enough,” she drawled at length. “But you’ll find I’m more… discerning. Let’s see if you can go a whole day obeying me before I need to exert my control over you to force you.”

Thor perked up, eager to be in command of his own limbs again. “Very well,” he said, nodding to accept her challenge. “Consider me your personal servant.” There was a slight edge to the warmth of his voice, a promise of generosity and attentiveness that exceeded any bounds of obligation.

“Speaking of _serv_ ing me,” Hela went on, countering the edge in Thor’s tone with a ruthless-sounding edge of her own. “The Draugrs _do_ have their deficiencies in that regard.”

***

Thor tried to look intrigued rather than affronted as he followed his sister on a tour around the palace, nodding as she listed her grievances concerning the undead warriors she’d positioned as guards and staff. Mostly, it annoyed her when they couldn’t move without creaking and rattling, and several of them had slack-jawed expressions on their mummified faces which annoyed her.

“Didn’t have the sense to die with a smile,” she complained of the closest offender. “Didn’t anyone teach him to die with his teeth showing, one way or the other? A triumphant grin or a vengeful grimace, cursing the foe who slays you—those are the only looks worth wearing for eternity.”

Thor snuck a glance at the face in question. The zombified Einherjar stared vacantly back at him. Thor thought he looked sad. He turned his eye back to Hela. “What about those who die in peace?” he asked before thinking better of it.

She turned and looked at him like he might have suggested eating spiders for dinner, with a refreshing glass of sewage to wash them down. “Peaceful deaths are as good as painless ones,” she informed him. “Boring. Useless. Unsatisfying.”

“Death in battle does sound better,” Thor added hurriedly. “But of course, you’re the expert.”

“Yes,” she smiled, mollified. “And I promise only the most glorious death in battle for you, when the time comes.”

“Perfect,” Thor said, copying her smile.

The day dragged on, Thor doing his best impersonation of an attentive serving boy, fetching things for her and holding her goblet at elbow-level for her while she spent a lazy afternoon drawing blades out of various surfaces around the palace, perfecting their size and shape.

“Elegant, yet formidable,” she purred over her latest creation, stroking one finger down its obsidian length. She’d been doing this for hours, sculpting blades and spikes and appraising their characteristics. She generally started out as approving of her own work, but would inevitably find a flaw that would cause her to start over. Thor had mostly tuned her out, so it surprised him when she turned to him with a question: “Do you think it’s large enough?”

“What?” Thor tensed, focusing on the blade. It was as long as his arm, sword-length, though it resembled a giant kitchen knife more than a sword. He couldn’t imagine a use for it. “Large enough for what?”

She smiled, pleased that he’d asked. “For our brother,” she stated. “When it’s time to eviscerate him, I want you to have a proper instrument.”

_Earn her trust, earn her trust,_ Thor thought furiously, trying his best not to look appalled. “I think it’s a little too big for that, actually,” he said regretfully.

“Oh?” Hela smirked. “You don’t strike me as the type inclined to precision.”

Thor shook his head. “The problem is that he’ll see it coming,” he explained, unable to conceal his guilty expression. “If you and I are going to kill him together, you’ll need a big, flashy weapon to distract him, and then I should have something small, something he won’t even notice.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Until it’s in him to the hilt,” she murmured, catching on. She pouted at the oversized knife and then drove it into the nearest wall, pressing it forward until it vanished into the stone as easily as a nail pushed into a mound of dirt. It occurred to Thor that nearly every wall on this side of the palace had been stabbed to death today.

Hela studied the wall, and then the floor, and then strode across the room to ponder a couple of pillars. Thor padded along beside her, keeping her goblet within reach of her hand. "What shall we use... to kill our baby brother?" Hela muttered, her eyes crawling over every surface. “Hmm. This won’t do. Show me his bedroom.”

Thor felt the chill of a warning in the back of his mind. His instinct was to refuse, but his determination to earn her trust overruled it. “Right this way,” he said as neutrally as possible.

***

Hela scoffed at the magical seal on the door to Loki’s room and melted it away with a hiss. “What was he keeping out with that one?” she wondered loudly, sweeping across the threshold. “Mice?”

“Me,” Thor admitted sheepishly, hurrying after her. “So I couldn’t get in if I was angry at him. It started as a joke, I think—it was about a thousand years ago.”

Hela lifted an eyebrow, her eyes sliding around the room, up and down the legs of the furniture, across the tidy desk. There was a small fresco on one wall depicting Odin and Frigga standing with their two small sons between them, Odin holding Thor’s hand, Frigga holding Loki’s, and Thor and Loki holding hands in the middle. Family portrait. Hela bared her teeth at it. “This can’t be right,” she complained, annoyed. “It’s too straightforward, too upfront. Show me where that little weasel kept his den.”

“This is it,” Thor protested. He waved his free hand at the bookshelves and trunks and the wall full of neatly closed drawers. “All his books and cloaks and magical knick-knacks are all right here.”

Hela studied Thor, her incredulity sharpening to anger. She stabbed a finger at Loki in the painted portrait. “Do you expect me to believe that your darling little brother, who worshiped you since before he could walk, never once invited you into his world?”

Thor swallowed, feeling the warning in his mind grow stronger. _Earn her trust,_ he told himself. “Invited me?” he scoffed. “No—like I just told you, he literally had a magic lock on the door to keep me out. We were close, but, um,”

“ _Not that close?_ ” Hela guessed, cutting him off. “Please. Don’t insult me by presuming I’d care about your… _relationship._ ” She rolled her eyes at Thor’s uncomfortable expression and stalked over to the bed. Abruptly she reached out and wiped her palm against the top pillow, then brought her palm to her face and sniffed it. Her eyelids fluttered. “Maybe this was his den after all,” she mused, and viciously yanked back the covers as if she expected to find someone hiding underneath them.

Thor’s heart jumped towards his throat at the thought that she might’ve found whatever she was looking for, but settled just as quickly as the discarded quilts settled on the floor beside the bed. Hela climbed onto the mattress and reclined against a heap of pillows, interlacing her fingers across her stomach. “Now, brother,” she smiled at Thor. “Why so anxious?”

“Sorry, I’m confused,” Thor said, which was true enough. “What are you doing? Are you going to craft a weapon out of wool and goose feathers?” 

She laughed. “You’re an absolute lamb,” she said fondly, reaching for the goblet. He handed it to her, not liking the way her fingers brushed over his during the exchange. She drank, licking her lips after. “Do you know how many people die in their beds? Too many.” She took a final sip and hurled the goblet across the room. It crashed against the fresco, the dregs of the wine spilling down the family portrait like a waterfall of blood. “Most boring way to go. But you remember what I told you, about the association between death and pain? How there’s a useful… affiliation? Death and sleep have a similar connection. I’m not here to make a weapon out of our brother’s blankets, no.”

She grinned, her mouth stained purple with wine. “I’m here to make one out of his _nightmares._ ”

Thor tried to steel his nerves as smoky wisps of magic began to swirl around his sister in a slow-motion cyclone, glittering like black pyrite. Her eyes rolled back, showing only the whites, and her battle-antlers grew outward from her head, curving and branching until they expanded to twice their usual size and intricacy. The vapory wisps lashed across the room, racing in every direction in a frenzy, darting and thrashing. Thor thought he felt one slither up his arm and tried to brush it away.

Suddenly a silver circle appeared in the air, displaying an image of Loki as a frowning Jotun, blue-skinned and ruby-eyed, wearing his horned helmet and a black fur cloak. Thor wondered for a split-second if that was one of Loki’s nightmares, but then he recognized the apparition as a scrying mirror.

“I wondered how long it would take you to go hunting for my secrets,” Loki said to Hela.

The irises of Hela’s eyes snapped down into place. “Ew,” she sneered at the sight of Loki’s blue skin. “I’d say you look like _death_ with that coloring, but honestly, you look far worse.”

Loki seemed flattered. “Perhaps it’s fitting for the _God of Death_ to look a bit gruesome,” he said pleasantly, and then didn’t wait for her reaction. “Isn’t it funny how you’re there on Asgard attempting to invade my space, while I’m here in Hel, invading yours?”

“You’re where?” Hela demanded.

“Hel,” Loki answered cheerfully. The view zoomed out to show the room—the palace—Loki was currently occupying. He was draped sideways across a throne of black skulls, one foot up on the armrest, while around him industrious Jotuns were dismantling everything that could be dismantled, smashing black stone statues and stained-glass windows and prying up the emerald-tiled floor.

“That’s my house,” Hela raged, sitting up.

“And isn’t that my _bed?_ ” Loki countered with false shock, clearly enjoying this. “Ugh. Thor, you traitor, I can’t believe you let her into my room. Please sanitize the sheets when she’s done.”

“Get your icy arse off my throne,” Hela growled dangerously, face white and pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

“Actually, burn the sheets,” Loki corrected. “And the bed. And the whole palace really, now that she’s befouled it.” Loki’s attention was called to something just out of view of the mirror. “What’s that?” Loki asked some unseen person on his end. “A statue that’s too large to remove, carved of a material that’s extremely difficult to destroy? Let’s see.” He stood swiftly and manipulated the scrying mirror to reveal a truly extraordinary, life-sized sculpture of Fenris, with a life-sized depiction of Hela astride the wolf’s shoulders.

Hela’s breath caught, and to Thor’s astonishment, he saw tears well in her eyes. “It took a thousand souls and four hundred years to carve that to perfection,” she exclaimed in a strangled whisper.

“And it is, actually, beautiful,” Loki said with the tiniest hint of regret. “Unfortunately, we can’t have such blatant reminders of the old regime just standing around for anyone to admire, and so… Hulk? Would you mind?”

“SMASH!” roared Hulk. Loki winced preemptively and, with a booming sound that made the mirror vibrate, the statue was reduced to rubble. The dust cleared, revealing heaving green shoulders. Hulk turned around to face the scrying mirror and lifted a hand in greeting. “Hi, Thor!”

“Hi, Hulk,” Thor answered fondly. Hela sent him a scathing glare and he hunched a little, pretending to be chastised.

Loki re-positioned the mirror so his face took up most of the image. “You know I do have to thank you, Thor, for that suggestion you gave me on Sakaar. About being more. God of Mischief, you know, I have that pretty solidly in the bag so I thought… how about a challenge?”

“You can’t be the God of Death,” Hela seethed, nearly trembling with fury.

Loki shrugged and guided the scrying mirror over to a grand balcony, where Korg stood waiting by a pair of tall double doors. “Do you hear that?” Loki asked through the mirror, barely able to suppress his grin. Korg threw open the doors and Loki stepped out into a flurry of snowflakes. Below him a crowd of what looked like billions had assembled across the landscape, celebrating in the middle of a blustery snowstorm. Loki canted his head to listen to the exuberant roaring of the crowd, and a chant became discernible amid the noise: “ _Hail Loki! God of Death!_ ”

Loki chanted it with them, smiling widely, then bowed eloquently to his new subjects and stepped back inside the palace. Korg closed the doors behind him. 

“There you have it,” Loki said smugly. “I think some of them are saying, ‘Hail Loki, Master of Hel’ or ‘Hail Loki, God of the Dead’, but that’s practically the same thing,” he intimated to the mirror. “Anyway the worst thing about Hel, I mean, _one_ of the worst things, is that it seems dreadfully dull. Some of these poor souls have been stifled for centuries. You can imagine how eager they were to embrace the revolution.” He turned to Korg. “What do you think, Korg? Are these people grateful for their new God?”

“That they are,” Korg reported amenably. “The previous administration was obviously oppressive. These souls are happy to be free.”

“Those souls are _mine_ ,” Hela declared savagely.

“There were a few residents here who were loyal to you, yes,” Loki said, striding briskly to the other side of the room. He maneuvered the mirror to peer out one of the broken windows there, revealing a modest assembly of warriors, standing in neat rows in a courtyard, all frozen solid. 

Heimdall and Valkyrie stood guard on raised platforms on either side of Hela’s ice-bound militia. Heimdall's greatsword stood vertically in front of him, the point resting against the ground. His hands were stacked formally on the hilt. He looked like he might hold that pose for a million years if it was asked of him. Valkyrie, on the other side, paced restlessly with her Dragonfang perched horizontally across her shoulders, her wrists hanging casually over it. 

“But just a few,” Loki went on lightly. “You know these dead souls freeze quite easily, much less effort required than freezing the living. Maybe I’ll thaw them out in a couple of centuries, see if they feel like changing sides, joining the new era. I suspect no one around here will even remember your name by then.”

Hela lashed out and grabbed Thor by the hair, yanking him forward and across the bed. She paralyzed him in place and planted one knee between his shoulder blades. Thor felt the edge of a knife press down across the back of his neck.

“That’s it,” Hela threatened. “I am killing him, right now.”

“Are you?” Loki wrinkled his nose. Thor could just barely see his brother out of the corner of his eye. Despite their crimson color, Loki’s eyes looked cold. “That _is_ your prerogative,” Loki said to Hela in a patronizing tone. “As long as you’re aware…” he smiled slyly. “ _I_ killed him first.”

The mirror flashed out of existence.

Hela snarled in outrage and shoved Thor off the bed, and then stood to pace furiously around the room, ranting. “Hel is my domain— _mine_ ,” she avowed. “I will defend my rights. If a new God of Death is recognized, it undermines me—it insults me!” she screamed in rage and materialized a cavalcade of black knives in midair, hurling them across the room, perforating the already-ruined portrait on the wall.

“I will be the only one,” she seethed. “The only one who reigns in Hel. Every meager underworld may have its master in its castle of bones but none of them hold a candle to me. What’s mine is mine, and my legacy will not be overshadowed by that scrap of a Jotun cur. That pitiful whelp will be shown his place—I will pulverize every bone in his body and bind him to a red-hot pillar of iron with cords made from his own intestines. I’ll have my favorite serpent drip venom into his eyes until the end of time itself!” She stopped abruptly, staring down at Thor, who was still crumpled on the floor where she’d discarded him.

After focusing intently on Hela all day, now Thor’s eye was closed tight. He seemed to be holding his breath, waiting for the end of her tirade - or perhaps anticipating a swift kick in the ribs. Hela stalked towards him, her headdress casting its menacing shadow over his body. 

“And it occurs to me,” Hela continued, staring wolfishly at Thor. “That I may be able to hurt him most of all… by hurting _you_. I assumed he would come to me, you know,” she mused in a darker voice, gazing down at the victim now centered in the web of her shadow’s antlers. “Since I have something he wants.”

Thor cautiously looked up at her, making a last-ditch effort to seem more like a potential ally rather than a helpless captive.

“But if our brother prefers to wage war in Hel,” she smirked. “I shall oblige.”

_Tell her about the Tesseract,_ prompted Loki’s voice in Thor’s mind. Thor hesitated. _Go on!_ Loki insisted. _Tell her you know a way to get there._

“…I know a way to get there,” Thor spoke up gruffly, not quite sure if the words were his own, or spoken through him.

***

Hela hurried Thor down to the vault, storming her way up to the Tesseract as if it owed her money. 

“ _This_ is an Infinity Stone?” she sneered at the glowing cube. “I sensed its potential as a weapon, but to think the Space Stone has been sitting here all along, neglected— _squandered_ —the Allfather must have truly been senile at the end.”

She grasped the Tesseract with both hands, hissing at the throb of its energy. Aquamarine light bloomed and shimmered around her, bathing the room in electric blue.

As Hela spent a moment communing with the magnificent power of the Stone, Thor felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned and glimpsed Loki’s shadow against the wall, unmistakable with his curved-horned helm. The shadow turned so Thor could see, in profile, one finger raised to its lips in the universal appeal for silence. Thor nodded, instantly on board. The shadow vanished—and so did Thor.

_I’ve turned you invisible,_ Loki said directly into his mind. _Stay quiet and head for Surtur’s Crown._

“Now, with this power, I will transport my army straight to Hel!” Hela crowed triumphantly, and spun on her heel, holding the Tesseract aloft like a trophy—and she found herself alone in the vault, her brother nowhere to be seen. An awkward silence descended.

She bared her teeth, offended by Thor’s disappearance. “Where are you?” she called, voice laced with danger. “You can’t have gone far.” She made a slashing motion with her hand, and Thor felt his body lock up, paralyzed again. 

Thor lost his balance and would have crashed face-first to the floor, but an unseen person caught him. _Got you,_ Loki’s projected thoughts assured him. Then Thor knew that it wasn’t just a trick—even though Thor couldn’t see him, Loki was there. Loki wrapped his arms around Thor’s chest to drag him bodily down the hall, and Thor felt a burning chill seeping through his skin from the contact.

_Jotun,_ Thor thought, startled by the cold.

_Yes, that’s been established,_ Loki thought dryly. _If I could change back, I would._

_Are you all right?_ Thor wondered in concern.

_Stronger than ever,_ Loki reported. _Just a tad monstrous. I did just usurp the Goddess of Death, you know._

Hela was prowling through the treasure room, illuminated by the eerie glow of the cube. “I can still feel you, close by…” she murmured. “Stop skulking and show yourself!” She began shooting black javelins from her hands at every possible hiding place, shattering priceless relics right and left.

Loki employed one of the oldest tricks in the edda and magically toppled a vase at the far end of the hall. Hela whirled towards the noise, taking the bait.

With Hela distracted, Loki hauled his stricken brother into a hidden gap in the wall. The closet-like space was barely big enough for the both of them, even with Loki hugging Thor against his chest.

_I knew you’d rescue me,_ Thor thought warmly. He had just enough range of motion to press his cheek against Loki’s invisible but perfectly solid shoulder, hoping Loki could tell that he was smiling.

_I haven’t quite managed that yet,_ Loki thought back, his voice tight. _Let’s just hope Hela will be content to leave you behind when she charges headfirst into the trap._

As if on cue, Hela’s demeanor shifted from rage to smug indifference. “Very well,” she pronounced. “If you won’t join me on this little expedition, you can wait for me here. I will find you eventually. When I return, I’ll have our brother writhing like an eel, with a hook right through his silver tongue—I expect his screams will roust you out.”

She turned the Tesseract over in her hands, clicking her fingernails against the glassy panes of the Stone’s container. “Time to open a portal,” she murmured to her newfound power source. “And reclaim what is mine.”

Eyes closed, Loki watched in his mind’s eye as Hela strode out of the vault. He let out a breath. “She’s gone,” he muttered to Thor. “We have to move fast.” Without a thought, he dropped the invisibility spell, and suddenly Thor and Loki were staring at each other, face to face. Loki had worn his Jotun skin a few times before, but never in Thor’s presence. Even when Loki had pretended to die he hadn’t turned all the way blue. He hadn’t wanted Thor to see him like that, like one of _them._

Before Loki could decipher how he felt about the surprise in Thor’s expression, Thor graced him with a wide, fond smile.

“Hm,” Thor said brightly. After everything that happened, Loki had still managed to come back to save his brother. It didn’t matter what color he was.

Loki reeled back, incensed. “What do you mean by ‘hm’?” he demanded.

“Oh,” Thor faltered, trying to explain his thoughts. “I meant, I don’t care,” he said.

“What do you mean _you don’t care?_ ” Loki snapped. “Who asked you if you cared?”

“No—” Thor’s face fell in distress. He took a calming breath, re-centering on what was most important. “I meant I’m glad you’re here,” Thor said. “And you’re lucky I can’t move my arms right now,” he added, beaming. “Because if I could, you’d probably have to treat me for frostburn.”

Loki blinked a few times, grasping for some reason to feel offended. “…That makes no sense,” he said at last. “If you could move your own limbs, I wouldn’t have had to drag you and there’d be no risk at all of—”

“Because I’d be hugging you,” Thor informed him, effectively shutting him up. “You big, blue idiot.”

Loki sighed, and there was a beat, a brief space where he almost said _I love you too, you insufferable oaf,_ but instead he only thought it—and Thor heard him anyway, completely by accident, in his mind.

“Damn it,” Loki muttered, looking away. “You know we’re supposed to be destroying the planet right now, don’t you?” he asked flatly.

Thor’s eyebrows went down. “Oh, right,” he muttered. “Ragnarok and all that.”

“Come on,” Loki said. Now that Hela was far enough away, he decided he could risk an attempt to countermand her control, just enough to get Thor up and moving on his own.

***

Together they found the Skull of Surtur, and after nodding to each other they hefted it from its mount. As they carried it to the Eternal Flame, Loki made a quick mental check of Hela’s location. She’d created an ominous portal to Hel just outside the palace, where her army was formed up and waiting—and worst of all, she’d unearthed the corpse of a winged horse from somewhere and was seated astride it, gesturing magnificently with Gungnir, rallying the Draugrs to advance through the portal. As Loki watched, Hela’s undead horse spread its moldering wings and leaped spectacularly into the aquamarine maw of the rift. The first rows of Draugrs marched forward, following their queen.

“We’re out of time,” Loki blurted. “If we don’t end this right now, Hela’s army will be unleashed on the universe.”

“…Only because you gave her the Tesseract,” Thor pointed out.

Loki’s mouth fell open. “You think I gave her—no. I _distracted_ her with the Tesseract, so I could pull you away from her.”

Now it was Thor’s turn to look scandalized. “Loki, there is a superpowered, evil being currently, at this moment, wielding the Space Stone. Are you telling me you let that power fall into the hands of a genocidal maniac just to save _me?_ ”

Loki narrowed his eyes. “Yes,” he said. He raised his chin. “And you know what? I’d do it again.”

Thor tensed his grip on Surtur’s Crown. Loki’s grip tightened by an equal amount. It was nearly a tug-of-war.

“Every second we delay, another hundred Draugrs march through the rift,” Loki said, voice low and almost too calm. “We’re going to do this together, remember?”

“Together, right,” Thor said, remembering. “At the end of everything.” He glanced into the Eternal Flame, then looked back at Loki, resolved. “Just in case we’re both about to die,” Thor mentioned, with sudden gravity in his tone, “I want you to know, you really are the best—”

“Not now, Thor,” Loki hissed. With one sudden motion, he jerked the crown out of Thor’s hands and heaved it into the flame. In the next instant, they were both knocked across the room by the explosive force of Surtur’s resurrection.

“Typical,” Thor shouted to Loki above the deafening roar of the fire giant growing as large as a mountain, right there in the middle of the vault. “I was trying to say something nice to you and you had to ruin it by ending the world!” He grinned.

From the midst of a maelstrom of fire, Loki grinned back at him. The palace walls began to collapse around them. Surtur, now erupting through the tallest spires of the palace, bellowed about Asgard’s doom.

The ancient prophecy would be fulfilled. Asgard would be destroyed, along with millions of Draugrs. A few thousand at most had made it through the portal to Hel, with Hela leading the charge—but they were heading right into a trap. It was all working out. It was perfect.

“Um, is there any chance you have a plan for us maybe not dying?” Thor hoped, interrupting Loki’s moment of satisfaction. 

“What? Oh, right,” Loki replied and cleared his throat. “Secret paths between worlds; I know the entrances, et cetera.” He smiled. “Let’s go.”

***

The secret way to Hel, it turned out, started in Asgard’s dungeon. That most-securely constructed part of the palace had just started to rumble with the precursory earthquakes of imminent destruction when Thor and Loki arrived.

As they hurried to the secret door, the sight of a solitary figure in a cell stopped Thor in his tracks. “Wait,” he gasped, grabbing Loki by the arm.

The prisoner knelt in the center of the cell, skewered through the chest by one of Hela’s long spears, the point of which was embedded in the stone. A pair of fang-like tattoos adorned the scalp of the prisoner’s head. Thor recognized them. “It’s Skurge,” he said. “We can’t leave him here.”

“What? Of course we can,” Loki huffed. “It’s Skurge.” The floor chose that moment to tremble. “We don’t have time,” Loki protested, but Thor wasn’t listening—he was making his way into the cell. 

Once Skurge identified his visitor he turned his face away in shame. 

“Come on,” said Thor. “We’re getting out of here.” He wrapped his hands around the spear and tugged, attempting to dislodge it from the floor. Skurge grunted in pain. 

“Don’t bother,” Skurge grumbled. “I’m not worth it. I betrayed you--I betrayed Asgard.” 

“He has a point, Thor,” Loki mentioned, eyebrows flinching. “He is a traitor.” 

Thor strained against the spear again, casting Loki a sideways look. “So were you,” he said. “And so was I.” 

Loki sighed and leaned down, gripping the spear where it protruded from either side of Skurge’s body. The portion of the weapon between Loki’s hands--the part going through Skurge--dissolved into black mist. 

Skurge slumped over with a groan, while Loki clamped his hands to the hole between Skurge’s shoulder blades and the hole through his sternum, striving to seal them. The rumbling of the fragmenting world grew louder. Loki nodded to Thor and they hoisted Skurge to his feet between them, his arms over their shoulders. 

They ran. Loki called for the hidden way to open and as they crossed the threshold, Surtur’s sword plunged through the world’s core.

The remains of Asgard exploded in a burst of white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story will be 8 chapters now, not 6 as originally drafted, because Hulk is cute and Loki won't shut up and Val needs revenge and there are too many things that need to happen and I'm having too much fun writing it. :) 
> 
> Endgame is almost upon us, y'all... are you freaking out? I'm freaking out.


	7. Battle and Bridge

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Asgard's gone. The Jotun warriors are attacked by Hela's undead hordes.  
> Thor and Loki cross the bridge into Hel.

When Hela surged through the portal into Hel astride her decaying winged mount, Valkyrie saw her first.

“What the _fuck,_ ” she swore. Her eyes blazed with murderous intent. She didn’t even notice the Draugrs pouring through the rift in Hela’s wake. All she saw was her target. She owed her Dragonfang a taste of Hela’s blood. Hela had never been a Valkyrie. Had never earned the right to touch one of those horses, living or dead. The fact that she’d likely been the one to murder that magnificent horse in the first place—for Hela had slain more of their mounts than any other foe the Valkyries had ever faced—made the whole thing even more disgusting. The very last Valkyrie would have revenge, for that horse and all the others. For herself, and all her fallen sisters.

Hela soared through the swirling snowstorm, riding high, powered forward by great thrusts of the horse’s wings. Gungnir gleamed like a beacon in her grasp, its light searing through the blowing snow and illuminating the path to the castle gates. Behind her the flood of Draugrs rattled their rusted swords and clanged their mildewed armor, rushing forward in a mindless frenzy. A cacophonous war-scream rose from their unhinged jaws like steam from a thousand sliced pipes.

The Jotuns were waiting for them.

As the Draugrs surged towards the castle the Jotuns unleashed a short-ranged cannon barrage of focused beams of energy, each crackling blast freezing a Draugr down to absolute zero and then rendering it so brittle that the merest vibration of sound could shatter it into a cloud of frozen specks. Puffs of frozen dust erupted across the Draugrs’ ranks each time the cannons fired. When the first lines of Draugrs overran the cannons the Jotuns themselves began to project defensive sheets of ice to slow their enemy’s advance, and any they couldn’t completely envelop in ice they dismembered with icy blades.

With their ancestral powers restored, many of the Jotun warriors were able to shift shape until they were truly giants, twenty to thirty feet tall. The tallest half-dozen of them moved in mind-synced unison, scything through rows of oncoming enemies with long-bladed pikes. The less experienced warriors moved between their elders, freezing the Draugrs’ broken remains into icy barriers for the rest of Hela’s forces to run up against, creating a hundred frozen obstacles between the portal and the castle.

Valkyrie was about to charge into the fray when Heimdall grabbed her wrist. “If Hela dies, Thor will die as well,” Heimdall reminded her. “Engage her, but do not kill her. We must lead her to the trap.”

Abruptly the flow of Draugrs from the portal ceased—fewer than three thousand had gotten in. And of those, several hundred had already been destroyed, all within the first minute of the attack. “Where are the rest?” Valkyrie asked, shouting to be heard above the ghoulish siren-wails of Hela’s troops. “Loki said there were millions!”

Heimdall stared off into the distance, his breath catching. “Ragnarok,” he uttered.

“What?” Valkyrie demanded.

“Ragnarok is complete,” Heimdall said. “Asgard is gone. The rest of Hela’s forces have been destroyed. These are all that remain.”

“Fuck!” Valkyrie exclaimed. “It’s gonna be a short fight! What happened to those idiot brothers?”

Heimdall’s expression clouded. “I cannot see them,” he reported. “Though that may not mean they are dead. Loki often hides from my sight.”

“Remind me to kick his ass for that,” Valkyrie yelled over the howling Draugrs. “What should we do?”

“We follow Loki’s plan,” Heimdall said. “We must ensure Hela reaches the throne room.”

Valkyrie nodded and leaped into the battle, cutting down Draugrs left and right, her eyes fixed on Hela.

Hela was flitting like a monstrous dragonfly well out of range of even the tallest Jotuns, nimbly dodging their sorcerous attempts to blast her out of the sky with projected vortexes of hail and cyclone-streams of supercooled plasma. She seemed to be enjoying herself, laughing raucously as she evaded each new attack. 

“That bitch,” Valkyrie muttered. If she had her _Warsong_ right now, she thought morosely, Hela wouldn’t be laughing for long. Unfortunately, the Scrapper’s ship had been shot down on Sakaar. Valkyrie had to get up there. She scrambled over mounds of frozen-solid Draugrs and kicked a twenty-foot-tall Jotun in the shin. “Hey!” she yelled.

The giant bent its head, peering down curiously at petite Asgardian in her antique armor. “Can you pick me up?” she called, pointing skyward.

“Why?” the giant asked.

“So you can throw me at Hela,” Valkyrie proposed, demonstrating an overhand pitch. “Just lob me right at her.”

The Jotun blinked its ruby eyes. “No,” it answered. It straightened and thudded away, looking for a fresh batch of Draugrs to cull. Valkyrie clenched her teeth, infuriated. How _dare_ that lumbering icicle-encrusted asshole refuse to help her. She was so enraged, she snatched up the nearest severed limb from the battlefield and beat it repeatedly against the nearest frozen barricade until both the limb and the barricade were reduced to bits.

Then her eyes widened, her own outburst reminding her of a friend who would certainly be willing to help her.

“Hulk!” she called urgently, sprinting to the place where her green friend was waiting. Hulk had a role in the plan, but that was for _later_ ; Valkyrie thought it was ridiculous that Loki had decided to exclude their strongest fighter from the initial action. “Hulk, I need your help!”

Hulk looked up, concerned. “Angry girl,” he greeted her. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Hela,” Valkyrie explained. “We can’t kill her and we have to get her to the throne room, but she’s riding on a flying horse and we need to catch her.”

Hulk definitely wanted to help, but he was confused. Whatever Valkyrie was talking about, it wasn’t the plan that Loki had explained to him. He opened his mouth to try to tell her that, but she lost patience and tugged at his hand.

“Come on, I’ll show you,” she said urgently. Hulk followed her outside, looking around at the mess of the winding-down battle in obvious discomfort.

“Big fight,” Hulk said grumpily. “War.”

Valkyrie pointed urgently at the sky. “Never mind that, Hulk, look up there!”

Hulk looked, eyes immediately locking on the swooping horse with Hela perched on its withers. “Bird horse,” Hulk rumbled in surprise.

“That’s it,” Valkyrie enthused. “Hela’s riding it and she’s not supposed to. Can you jump up there and catch that horse?” she asked. “Remember, don’t kill Hela. If you kill Hela, Thor will die, too.”

Hulk nodded, understanding. He gauged the flight path of his target, bent his legs, and jumped—launching into the air a hundred feet, two hundred feet, three hundred feet up.

He tackled the horse in midair and fell with it to the ground, Hela and all.

Hulk absorbed the impact of the landing so it wouldn’t damage the creatures he carried—but when Hela scrambled away from him, sputtering curses, the winged animal fell limp, once more a corpse as Hela had found it.

“Good job, Hulk!” Valkyrie called, running up with her sword at the ready. “Hela!” she yelled ferociously. “You’re mine.”

Hela whirled and used Gungnir to block the first thrusts of the Dragonfang. “By Odin’s ashes, are you actually a Valkyrie?” Hela queried in astonished delight. “I thought you all died gruesome deaths.”

That was an all-too-familiar phrasing. Valkyrie’s eyelid twitched. “Not as gruesome as yours will be,” she promised. She and Hela exchanged another parry-and-thrust.

“No, really,” Hela grinned. “I thought I exterminated all of Odin’s little whores personally.” She spun, extending Gungnir in her hand and swinging it down in a deadly arc over her head, which Valkyrie blocked.

“You thought wrong,” Valkyrie replied, sword over her shoulder and eyes burning dark with rage.

“How did you escape?” Hela asked conversationally, neatly sidestepping Valkyrie’s next attack—and then hissing as Valkyrie’s move turned out to be a feint. She jerked Gungnir back defensively at the last minute, and Valkyrie’s blade came to a halt in a screech of sparks inches from Hela’s face.

Valkyrie’s smile curved cruelly. “I’ll tell you all about it,” she said. “After I cut off your head.”

Hela bared her teeth, relishing this chance to duel with someone she thought she had killed ages ago. The fight intensified, Valkyrie allowing Hela to edge her back towards the palace.

***

Meanwhile, Hulk carried the broken horse away from the fighting, looking for someone who might be able to help. “Korg!” he called, spotting his new, rock-like friend. “Korg, help.”

“Ah, hello Hulk,” Korg said kindly, propping an enormous stone cudgel over his shoulder. The battle was basically won at this point—there were twice as many Jotuns as Draugrs on the field now, so Korg didn’t mind stopping for a chat with the former Champion of Sakaar. “What’ve you got there?”

“Bird horse,” Hulk explained.

Korg’s eyes widened. “The one Hela was buzzing around on? You brought it down?”

Hulk nodded.

“Well done, mate,” Korg said, clapping Hulk’s arm.

Hulk shook his head. “No,” he said. “Horse… hurt.” He held the carcass up for Korg to inspect.

Korg blinked a few times. “That horse,” he said at last. “Is dead.”

Hulk’s eyes were wide with horror. “Hulk killed Bird horse?”

“No surprise there, right?” Korg asked. “I mean, you’re a Champion killer. Back on Sakaar you even killed a few friends of mine.”

“Hulk Sorry!” Hulk said in distress. “Fix horse!”

Korg cocked his head slightly, realizing that Hulk was genuinely upset. He set a rocky hand on Hulk’s arm. “I’m afraid we can’t fix it, Hulk. If it makes you feel any better, it’s probably been dead for a long time.” 

That didn’t make Hulk feel better at all. He laid the horse’s body on the ground and crouched beside it, arms wrapped around his knees, trying to hide his face. Korg patted his shoulder, recognizing that the Champion was… sad.

“It’s all right, Hulk,” Korg said kindly, but the words had no effect. Hulk’s shoulders were shuddering. Then he started to shrink. 

“Uh oh,” Korg remarked, drawing back. “Um, I understand that death is a difficult thing to process and an emotional response to a dead animal like this can be perfectly normal, even for a seasoned warrior, but, I’m pretty sure we need you for the plan, so maybe it’s not the best time to… oh. Nevermind, you’re a human again.”

“Oh my god. Where am I?” Bruce gasped, crouched in a ball as Hulk had been. Wherever he was, it was freezing. Snowing. Tears, either from the cold or some fading ghost of grief, were running down Bruce’s face. He was barefoot and bare-chested, his stretched-out pants threatening to fall off him. In front of him was the half-decayed carcass of a horse--with wings. 

“We’re in Hel,” Korg provided helpfully. 

Before Bruce could react to that, Heimdall came vaulting over the nearest frozen barricade, sword at the ready. “Bruce Banner,” he said gravely. “You’re not supposed to be here.” 

“In Hell? Great. Thanks.” Bruce got to his feet, one hand clutching his pants to his waist.

“Can you change back?” Heimdall asked directly.

Bruce took a deep breath and thought about being angry. _Come on Hulk. They need you._

_No!_ Hulk thought back, retreating as far as possible from Bruce’s reach. 

_Why not?_ Bruce wondered desperately. 

_BECAUSE,_ Hulk roared from the furthest-away space in Bruce’s mind. Bruce braced for a follow-on explanation, but none came. It was as if Hulk had slammed a door in his brain. 

Bruce hadn’t realized he’d closed his eyes. He opened them, breathing hard from the effort of trying to force a transformation. “Sorry,” he panted miserably. “Hulk’s not cooperating.”

Heimdall took the heavy cloak from his own shoulders and passed it to the shivering human. Bruce accepted it, bundling himself up. “I’m gonna need boots, too,” Bruce mentioned sheepishly. His feet were already stinging from the cold. 

Korg noticed a decent-looking pair of boots on one of the frozen Draugrs. He snapped the Draugr’s skeletal legs off at the knees and shook all the foot-bones out of the boots. “Here you go!” Korg said cheerfully, offering the boots to Bruce. Bruce tugged them on without complaint. 

“Hela has reached the castle,” Heimdall informed them. 

“Okay, is that good or bad?” Bruce wondered in distress. 

“That depends,” Heimdall rumbled solemnly. “On Loki.” 

***

“...Did we make it?” Thor asked, his chest heaving. As far as he could tell, they had emerged from the other side of the door into the middle of a vast, dark plain. He could just make out the features of his brother and Skurge beside him. The three of them moved forward a few steps, stopping when their boots splashed water. 

“The river Gjoll,” Loki noted. “We made it. Hel is just on the other side.” 

Thor frowned, remembering some half-absorbed lesson from his education concerning the river that separated Hel from the lands of the living. “But if we cross it,” he asked. “Won’t we die?”

“If we pass through the water, yes,” Loki said. “Fortunately, there’s a bridge. Right here.”

“It’s called Gjallerbru,” Skurge spoke up groggily. “I’ve heard of it.”

“Right,” Thor said. He’d heard of it too, of course, but hadn’t remembered the legendary bridge until Skurge mentioned it. 

“When I invaded Hel this morning, I snuck a whole army of Jotuns across this bridge,” Loki mentioned pleasantly. “Not to mention a Hulk.” 

They hiked up the bridge, reaching its apex quickly. From the top, more of their surroundings became visible. The glassy violet-black river beneath them had faint brushes of vapor rising from its surface, like heat escaping a lake in autumn. The shore ahead appeared to be a beach of gray pebbles. 

Then they saw the souls. Hundreds upon hundreds of newly deceased souls from all over the Nine Realms--and a few from further out--were surfacing silently in the middle of the river and wading ashore. Most were people, but there were a few animals, too. Not all animals had souls, of course - but for that matter, neither did all people. 

Arriving on the beach ahead, some souls trudged immediately inland. A few stood gazing back at the water before turning and joining the constant stream of people entering their designated afterlife. Some of the souls collapsed to their knees on the beach, visibly grieving for what they’d left behind. Others emerged from the water and ran straight into the arms of someone who’d been there waiting for them, and others still stood patiently on the shore, waiting. Here and there one of the animals lingered, interspersed with the people-- usually a dog, sitting and looking intently across the river, tail wagging hopefully at each new arrival who emerged. There were a few other animals too-- a cat paced back and forth at the edge of the water. A horse stood with its head high, front feet in the water and ears pricked forward as if it could hear its master calling from the other side. 

Thor’s heart twisted at the sight of them all. _Someone should come up with a better system,_ he thought, not particularly to himself. 

_As the new God of Death, I’ll see what I can do,_ Loki thought back dryly. Thor was pretty sure he was joking, but there was an undertone of empathy to the thought, as though Loki genuinely agreed with his sentiment. _...A visitation policy,_ Loki thought on unexpectedly. _At the very least. For those whose loved ones end up elsewhere._

“I thought you were only doing it to rile our sister, but I guess you’re taking this Master of Hel thing pretty seriously,” Thor said in surprise. 

“Just thinking ahead,” Loki replied.

That struck Thor as ominous. “What do you mean?” he wondered, worried. “Surely you don’t think you’ll wade ashore someplace where I’m not waiting for you?”

“No,” Loki lied. “And by Odin’s beard, what an image. Please tell me you know we’re not married.”

Their eyes were drawn to one of the souls waiting on the shore that was significantly smaller than all those around it--the soul of a little girl. As they watched, a woman emerged from the water and stumbled up the beach, and the child ran to her arms. A faint glow like a misty sunrise emanated from their embrace. 

Thor swallowed at the sudden knot in his throat. “Think _they’re_ married?” He wondered pointedly. There was more than one kind of love that could last for eternity. 

Skurge, meanwhile, hadn’t exactly been following the brother’s conversation, but he did notice the mother embracing her child ahead on the beach.

“...Are they dead?” Skurge asked quietly. 

Loki nodded. “This bridge is the only way for the living to get in or out of Hel,” he explained. “All those you see passing through the river are dead.” 

“What about the Tesseract?” Thor asked. “Can’t the living use that?” 

Loki sighed, rankled. “Yes, of course there are exceptions. If you have something like the Space Stone or can summon the Bifrost it is possible to enter Hel alive without crossing Gjallerbru.” 

“It just occurred to me, Loki,” Thor said brightly. “You must have a plan for stealing the Tesseract back from her.”

“Among other things,” Loki muttered. 

Thor tilted his chin down, mildly puzzled. “Like what?”

Loki sighed. “Thor, hasn’t it occurred to you that the less you know of my plans, the less likely you are to spoil them? You’re still connected to Hela, you know--you’d still be paralyzed by her command right now if I wasn’t blocking her magic for you. She still controls your power.” 

“Oh,” Thor said. He sounded so crestfallen that Loki took pity on him. 

“But not for long,” Loki assured him. “And I haven’t tried to share my plans with you because I have so many of them and they’re all constantly changing. But you are correct: I do intend to deprive Hela of that Infinity Stone in the end.”

They reached the other side of the bridge, stepping down onto the crunchy gray bone-gravel, a testament to Hel’s long history as a depository for dead bodies. Carcasses had accumulated there, washed ashore by the river for eons before the evolution of souls.

Before they went further, Loki paused and looked back at the bridge. “Speaking of plans changing,” he said. “All the secret tunnels to other worlds are back on the other side. This bridge might be a vital escape route if the Tesseract and the Bifrost are both out of play. If Hela’s thinking ahead, she’ll want this bridge destroyed.” He looked critically at Skurge, sizing him up. “We probably ought to leave a guard.”

Skurge swallowed, doing his best to stand up straight. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I, um, I don’t have any weapons, though.” 

Loki stroked a vertical line in the air like unzipping a zipper, reached into the pocket dimension he’d opened, and drew out Skurge’s massive battle axe, the same one Hela had given him. He pressed it into Skurge’s waiting grasp. “Now you do,” Loki stated. 

Skurge tested the weight of the axe, looking unhappy. Loki quirked an eyebrow at him. “Something wrong?” he wondered. 

“Sorry,” Skurge muttered. “I was thinking I’d rather have something else, but, nevermind.” 

Loki made a sour face, and pulled a pair of lightweight, air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed assault rifles out of thin air, commonly known on Midgard as M16s. “You were looking for these?” he asked airily.

Skurge’s face brightened. “Des and Troy!” he exclaimed. "Those are my favorites!"

Loki chucked the rifles into the river. Skurge’s face fell. “Too bad,” Loki said coolly. 

Thor put a consolatory hand on Surge’s shoulder. “Sorry, Skurge,” he said. “Guns aren’t cool.” Skurge looked like he might be on the verge of tears, so Thor patted his back enthusiastically. “Axes, though,” Thor went on. “Axes are awesome!” 

Loki rolled his eyes. “Yes, it’s so much better to butcher people the old fashioned way, hacking and chopping and bludgeoning and so forth--” he caught Thor’s concerned expression and realized that his brother was missing the point. “It’s not about the weapon, it’s about the character of the person who wields it,” he recited, as if explaining basic math. He turned his eyes to Skurge, laser-sharp. “You aren’t a coward, are you?”

Skurge tightened his grip on his battle axe. “...I’ve been a coward my whole life,” he said quietly. “But I’ll be brave today. Hela’s minions won’t set one foot on this bridge. I’ll hold off Hela herself if it comes to that.” 

“Thank you,” Loki said. 

“Glad to hear it,” Thor said at the same time. There was a beat, something heavy in the air, and all three of them seemed to sense it. 

Loki turned to look inland, where the spires of Hela’s fortress were just barely visible in the saddle between two mountains. Swirling storm clouds were brewing a blizzard overhead--a sign that the battle against Hela was progressing in the Jotuns’ favor. Loki reached out telepathically to his generals to confirm that victory was assured. 

_Only a few of the devils left,_ came the answer.

“We better go,” Loki said to Thor, with a cordial note of regret in his voice for the unfortunate necessity of leaving Skurge behind.

“Good luck,” Skurge wished them. He propped the handle of his axe against his shoulder and held out his hand for Loki to clasp.

Loki blinked at him like he’d lost his mind.

“He doesn’t want to freeze your hand off,” Thor said amiably. He shook Skurge’s hand and then pulled him in for a hug. “Consider that from both of us,” Thor said, letting him go. “And if you must fight, fight well.”

***

Moments later, a giant raven and a golden eagle soared through the gusting snow flurries, alighted on one of the castle balconies, and transformed back into Loki and Thor.

“Ah, I miss doing that,” Thor exclaimed warmly, brushing copper-tinged feathers off his arms.

Loki frowned at his blue hands, willing the transformation to continue, to bring back his Aesir skin. His heavy cloak settled around him, looking an awful lot like a huge pair of coal-black wings. Gradually, the texture of the cloak morphed back into fur instead of feathers. His skin, frustratingly, stayed blue.

Thor took a step and nearly fell over. He lowered himself to the ground, sitting with his back against the railing of the balcony. He looked worriedly up at Loki for an explanation.

“Careful,” Loki warned. “Now that we’re back in Hela’s vicinity her magic might be reasserting itself over mine.” He narrowed his eyes, studying the malevolent energy pulsing in Thor’s veins. It was ugly, devious stuff, full of venom--but Loki had experience with such things. It wouldn’t be impossible to wrangle. He turned his hand in the air and a ball of light appeared between his fingers. He passed the little orb to Thor. “Hold this until the light goes out,” Loki instructed. “It should numb up Hela’s power again, enough to keep you mobile. It may take a few minutes.”

“So we have time to talk?” Thor asked hopefully.

Loki steadied himself. “Why not,” he said, flashing an agreeable smile. “What shall we talk about?”

“You used to transform us into animals all the time,” Thor reminisced. “Why’d you stop?”

It was an innocent question, but Loki felt a twinge of regret. He plucked a stray feather from his hair and watched it fade to nothingness in his hand. “Odin disapproved,” he answered.

“Pfft,” Thor scratched the last few golden-brown feathers from the back of his own head. “Since when did father’s disapproval stop you from doing something fun?”

“More often than you know,” Loki retorted. “In this particular case…he said I wasn’t responsible enough to handle it.”

The bitter edge in Loki’s voice escaped Thor’s notice. He chuckled, recalling their centuries of adolescence. “You were a bit wild at times,” he remembered. “But I was a dozen times worse.”

“Indeed,” Loki agreed. “Though Odin evidently thought otherwise. Shapeshifting into animals was one of the abilities he took away from me. Joke was on him, of course, because I adapted and learned to shapeshift into people instead. Caused ten times the trouble.”

Thor frowned, having sifted out the most important kernel of that. The little ball of light flickered in his hands. “…What else did he take?”

“It’s irrelevant now,” Loki said lightly. “I got those abilities back when Odin died. And when I returned the Casket of Ancient Winters to Jotunheim I was given access to more power than I know what to do with.”

“I know what you could do with it,” Thor suggested in cheerful conspiracy. “Get rid of Hela, undo what she did to me, and then turn us both into dragons so we can wrestle the Hulk.”

Loki shook his head, his smile halfway between fond and apologetic. “The only thing I want to turn into is the person I used to be,” he admitted. “And, inexplicably, that’s the one thing all this new power won’t let me do.”

“Hmm,” Thor considered. “Loki, over the past few days, you went from impersonating our father, to schmoozing with the Grandmaster, to somehow convincing Valkyrie to help me escape from Sakaar—” Loki tried to speak up there, but Thor overrode him. “Don’t try to deny it, I know that was something you did to her, even if you did it in some underhanded way for which you allowed her to punish you.”

“I was only going to mention that it was technically weeks, for me, on Sakaar,” Loki clarified. “Not days. And please don’t use the word ‘schmoozing’, ever again, in reference to the Grandmaster or otherwise.” He stared at the gradually dimming orb in Thor’s hands, wishing it would hurry up.

“Very well,” Thor nodded, moving on. “In any case, you then brought the ship to Asgard to save our people from extinction, and then, just today, you invaded Hel with Heimdall, Korg, Valkyrie, and Hulk by your side, not to mention an army of the very people you once tried to massacre. You know what that says about you?”

Loki shrugged, displaying his smuggest smile. “I’m… disruptive?” he guessed. “Spontaneous? Mercurial?”

Thor nodded patiently. “Capable of change,” he rephrased. “All those people who followed you to Hel today, they used to be your enemies. They all had more reason to hate you than trust you.”

“Therefore, I must be persuasive,” Loki construed. “Manipulative.” His smile turned oily. “Some might even say charming.” 

“Compelling,” Thor corrected. “It shows that you’re making an effort to repair what was broken. Return what was stolen—you took the initiative to rectify an interplanetary injustice that wasn’t even your fault in the first place. And you’re trying to rebuild relationships—you’re not the same person you used to be. You’re trying to be better. I think Heimdall senses that, and Valkyrie, and even Hulk. That’s why they all fought for you today.”

Loki laughed, shaking his head in disbelief. “Are you really that dense? That oblivious?” he wondered aloud. “Thor. They didn’t fight _for me._ ”

There was a beat as the familiar point echoed in the space between them. The little ball of light was almost dark. Thor refused to back down. “Fine, they all want to free me from Hela,” he allowed. “I’m thankful for that. But you can’t deny they followed your lead today. Followed their _leader._ They didn’t do that because you tricked them or flattered them or forced them to obey you. They didn’t do it because you were Odin’s son, or Laufey’s—”

“Actually, the Jotuns have formally recognized me as their king,” Loki interrupted. “I’m assuming my father’s identity was a factor.”

Thor was undeterred by the snark. “Did they beg Laufey’s heir to come back and claim the throne?” he asked. “Or, did they choose to recognize and respect you for a choice that you made? I think they acknowledged you as their king because you chose to give power back to your people, rather than keep it for yourself.”

Emotions welled in Loki’s chest, pushing upward and outward until he could feel them buzzing uncomfortably behind his eyes. He realized he had no idea if Jotuns could cry. He suspected they could not. “Damn you, Thor,” he muttered. “I’m not that good.”

The little orb went dark, perhaps due to its inability to compete with the beaming brightness of Thor’s smile. “You’re also not that bad,” he teased.

Loki wrinkled his nose, exasperated. “I’m also not having this conversation anymore.” His emotions dwindled away, banished by Thor’s annoying positivity. “Can you stand?”

Thor pulled himself to his feet, testing out his control of his limbs. “...Time to fight our sister?” he asked with a grin. 

Loki’s eyes gleamed, bright and red. “Time to beat her."

Thor set a hand on Loki’s shoulder, partially to steady himself, but mostly to reassure his brother that Thor had his back. 

“Lead the way,” said Thor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ONE CHAPTER LEFT!!!!
> 
> So, has everybody seen Endgame by now? **spoiler for Endgame ahead, stop now if you haven't seen it!** I need to come up with a way for the Bird Horse from this chapter to be brought back to life, both to cheer up Hulk, and for Valkyrie to adopt it because WHERE did she get that horse she was riding around on in Endgame? Pretty sure they didn't just have a bunch of extra flying horses hanging out on Asgard. Is it magically conjured? If so, by whom? Where did it come from??? Seriously if you know or have any ideas along those lines, please let me know. Thank you!!

**Author's Note:**

> ...to be continued :)


End file.
